Articles in press by Sandra Auderset
Some languages constrain the recursive embedding of NPs to some specific morphosyntactic types, a... more Some languages constrain the recursive embedding of NPs to some specific morphosyntactic types, allowing it for example only with genitives but not with bare juxtaposition. In Indo-European, every type of NP embedding — genitives, adjectivizers, adpositions, head marking, or juxtaposition — is unavailable for syntactic recursion in at least one attested language. In addition, attested pathways of change show that NP types that allow recursion can emerge and disappear in less than 1000 years. The wide-ranging synchronic diversity and its high diachronic dynamics raises the possibility that at many hypothetical times in the history of the family recursive NP embedding could have been lost for all types simultaneously, parallel to what has occasionally been observed elsewhere (Everett 2005, Evans & Levinson 2009). Performing Bayesian phylogenetic analyses on a sample of 55 languages from all branches of Indo-European, we show however that it is extremely unlikely for such a complete loss to ever have occurred. When one or more morphosyntactic types become unavailable for syntactic recursion in an NP, an unconstrained alternative type is very likely to develop in the same language. This suggests that, while diachronic pathways away from NP recursion clearly exist, there is a tendency – perhaps a universal one – to maintain or develop syntactic recursion in NPs. A likely explanation for this evolutionary bias is that recursively embedded phrases are not just an option that languages have (Fitch et al. 2005), but that they are in fact preferred by our processing system.
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Conference Presentations by Sandra Auderset
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Talk given at the Transalpine Typology Meeting 2015 in Lyon. Summarizes the findings of my master... more Talk given at the Transalpine Typology Meeting 2015 in Lyon. Summarizes the findings of my master's thesis.
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Master's Thesis by Sandra Auderset
This cross-linguistic study investigates morphological overlaps in voice and person markers and t... more This cross-linguistic study investigates morphological overlaps in voice and person markers and their historical connections in order to answer the following questions: a) how frequent such developments are, b) whether there are areal patterns and c) whether passives are indeed primarily associated with third person plural markers and antipassives with first person plural markers.
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Articles in press by Sandra Auderset
Conference Presentations by Sandra Auderset
Master's Thesis by Sandra Auderset