1. University of Bielefeld, gerhard.jaeger@uni-bielefeld.de
Priming as a driving force in grammaticalization: on the track of unidirectionality
Gerhard Jäger
University of Bielefeld,
Anette Rosenbach
University of Düsseldorf,

2. Unidirectionality of grammaticalization processes
controversial issue (see e.g. special issue of Language Sciences 23; Newmeyer 1998; Lass 2000; Haspelmath 2004)
consensus: most grammaticalization processes cannot be reversed
Why should that be so?

3. Possible reasons for unidirectionality
pro unidirectionality:
Haspelmath (1999)
maxim of extravagance (Keller 1994) as a driving force in grammaticalization; lack of degrammaticalization is due to lack of a counteracting principle of ‚anti-extravagance‘
contra unidirectionality:
Janda (2001)
unidirectionality (as a diachronic constraint) cannot exist in the light of the individual speaker, because current speakers have no awareness of a language‘s history – pathways are therefore always, in principle, reversable for speakers
Our stance: we adopt Janda‘s view but at the same time we want to show that accounting for DU and adopting a speaker-based approach is not incompatible

4. Usage-based account of unidirectionality – our proposal
psycholinguistic mechanism of ‚priming‘

5. Organization of talk Introduction Priming Two case studies
Space > time (Boroditsky 2000)
Phonological reduction (Shields & Balota 1991)
A usage-based account of directional change (based on priming)
Conclusion

6. 2. Priming
tendency of speakers to re-use previously mentioned/heard linguistic items
phenomenon may be operating on:
discourse-functional level  ‚parallelism, ‚repetition‘ (cf. e.g. Tannen 1987)
cognitive/ psycholinguistic level  ‚priming‘
(cf. e.g. Bock 1986; Bock & Loebell 1990; Pickering & Branigan 1999; Zwitserlood 1996)

7. Priming as a psycholinguistic mechanism
priming = pre-activation
processing of a stimulus linguistic unit (‚prime‘) influences (usually facilitates) the processing of the same or a similar linguistic unit (‚target‘)
prime identical with target: repetition (‚direct‘) priming
prime similar to target: associative (‚indirect‘) priming
operates
on all linguistic levels: phonological, semantic, lexical, morphological, syntactic priming
in language production (e.g. Bock 1986)
in language comprehension (e.g. Luka & Barsalou 2005)
in dialogue (Pickering & Garrod)
Give here examples for structural and lexical priming: see next 2 slides

8. Priming: examples repetition priming
(a) At what time does your shop close?  at six (b) What time does your shop close?
six
(Levelt & Kelter 1982)
Level/Kelter 1982: asked shopkeepers – example for structural priming
D‘Arcais/Schreuder: example for lexical (semantic) priming – note also: similarity suffices for priming

9. Priming: examples associative priming:
e.g. picture naming task (Flores d‘Arcais & Schreuder 1987)
violin easier to name after semantically related prime guitar than after unrelated prime chair
primes
doesn‘t
prime
This also shows: primes don‘t need to be identical, just sufficiently similar

10. Priming: examples ‚contextual priming‘* prime: tip of the ...
target: tongue
(*our term; specific case of syntactic priming: words with high contextual probability are easier to process (Howes 1951, Boland 1997, McDonald et al 2001, inter alia)
Level/Kelter 1982: asked shopkeepers – example for structural priming
D‘Arcais/Schreuder: example for lexical (semantic) priming – note also: similarity suffices for priming

11. 3.2 Phonological reduction
3. Case studies
3.1 From space to time
3.2 Phonological reduction

12. 3. 1 Case study I: from space to time
space-time correspondences in language:
space
time
from London to Paris
from Monday to Friday
in England
in January, in time of war
at the door
at noon
The king rode before the army
before the battle started
They are a mile behind us
They are an hour behind us
from Deutscher (2005:134)

13. Space > time
presumably universal grammaticalization pathway from space to time
unidirectional:
space > time
but not: time > space
see e.g. Heine et al. (1991)
Haspelmath (1997)
Heine & Kuteva (2002),
Hopper & Traugott (2003:85)

14. evidence from experimental priming studies:
Boroditsky (2000)
space > time:
evidence from experimental priming studies:
In how far can spatial expressions prime temporal expressions, and vice versa?

15. Temporal metaphor
2 dominant spatial metaphors to sequence events in time (cf. e.g. Clark 1973)
ego-moving metaphor
We are coming up on
Christmas.
time-moving metaphor
Christmas is coming up.
(from Boroditsky 2000:5)

16. Spatial metaphor (from Boroditsky 2000: 6) ego-moving metaphor
object-moving metaphor
(from Boroditsky 2000: 6)

17. Boroditsky (2000): experiment 1 Can space prime time?
primes (spatial scenarios consisting of picture and a sentence description):
ego-moving spatial: e.g. The dark can is in front of me.
object-moving spatial: e.g. The light widget is in front of the dark widget.
targets: ambiguous temporal sentences, e.g. Next Wednesday‘s meeting has been moved forward two days.
results: after ego-moving spatial prime: 73.3% ego-moving temporal interpretation (i.e. meeting is on Friday) after object-moving spatial prime: 69.2% time-moving temporal interpretation (i.e. meeting is on Monday)
space can prime time !

18. Boroditsky (2000): experiment 2 Can time also prime space?
spatial:
ego-moving: e.g. The flower is in front of me.
object-moving: e.g. The hat-box is in front of the Kleenex.
temporal:
ego-moving: e.g. On Thursday, Saturday is before us.
time-moving: e.g. Thursday comes before Saturday.
2 targets:
ambiguous time questions: e.g. Next Wednesday‘s meeting has been moved forward two days.)
ambiguous space questions: e.g. Which one of these widgets is ahead ?

19. Boroditsky (2000): results from experiment 2
(from Boroditsky 2000: 14)

20. Boroditsky (2000): results from experiment 2
time to time: yes
Temporal ego-moving prime  temporal ego-moving interpretation
time-moving prime  time-moving interpretation
space to space: yes
Spatial ego-moving prime  spatial ego-moving interpretation
object-moving prime  object-moving interpretation
space to time: yes
Spatial ego-moving prime  temporal ego-moving interpretation
Object-moving prime  time-moving interpretation
time to space: no
Temporal ego-moving prime  spatial ego-moving interpretation
Time-moving prime  object-moving interpretation

21. Boroditsky (2000:22)
„Apparently, space and time can share structural relational information on-line, but this sharing is asymmetric; spatial schemas can be used to think about time, but temporal schemas cannot be used to think about space.“

22. 3.2 Case study II: phonological reduction
Phonological reduction in grammaticalization
phoneme reduction ahg brenjan > nhg brennen
phoneme deletion let us > lets

23. Phonological reduction
„In the process of phonological attrition and selection […], we can identify two tendencies:
A quantitative („syntagmatic“) reduction: forms become shorter as the phonemes that comprise them erode.
A qualitative („paradigmatic“) reduction: the remaining phonological segments in the form are drawn from a progressively shrinking set.“
Hopper & Traugott (2003: 154)

24. Priming and phonological reduction
Shields and Balota (1991):
experimental study of repetition on
word length
amplitude
results:
both repetition and associative priming lead to shortening
repetition priming also leads to reduced amplitude

25. Shields and Balota (1991) Typical stimuli:
identical
Her cat chases our cat under the table.
related
Her dog chases our cat under the table.
unrelated
Her son chases our cat under the table.

26. Shields and Balota (1991) method: subjects
read sentences in present tense
had to repeat them by heart in past tense
cat in „our cat“ was acoustically analyzed

27. Shields and Balota (1991): Results
Duration:
(cat) … cat: 329 msec
(dog) … cat: 340 msec
(son) … cat: 350 msec

28. Shields and Balota (1991): Results
Amplitude:
(in comparison to reference vowel)
(cat) … cat: dB
(dog) … cat: dB
(son) … cat: dB

29. Shields and Balota (1991): Results
Amplitude:
difference between repetition (cat – cat) and other two conditions is significant
difference between related (dog – cat) and unrelated (son – cat) condition is not significant

30. Further evidence
various studies that show that increased probability of a word in a context leads to reduced pronounciation:
Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, Raymond (2000)
Gahl and Garnsey (2004)
can be interpreted as phonological reduction under contextual priming

31. 4. A usage-based account of directional change
(based on priming)

32. Priming and similarity
Priming is related to similarity:
If A and B are similar, then A can prime B
more general: if
A is probable in a context C, and
A is similar to B,
Then
B is primed by context C

33. Priming and similarity
similarity is reflexive (A is similar to A)
repetition priming
contextual probability effects
similarity is not identity
associative priming
guitar can prime violin and vice versa

34. Priming and similarity
similarity can be asymmetric
Want to is more similar to wanna than vice versa
spatial configurations are more similar to homomorphic temporal configurations than vice versa …

35. Bold hypothesis Transitivity suppose
A has high probability in context C, and
A is similar to B
then, after sufficiently many repetitions
B‘s probability in context C increases

36. Consequences suppose then A is similar to B (in a context C), and
B is not similar to A (in C)
then
the BH (bold hypothesis) predicts that B will eventually replace A in C

37. Implication for unidirectionality
unidirectional pathways of language change should be decomposable into atomic steps of asymmetric similarity
replication in language use via priming

38. Predictions (falsifiable)
„asymmetric similarity“ is defined in terms of priming  can be tested by means of psycholinguistic experiments
frequency effects: „transitivity“ depends on frequency of triggering context  frequent items should undergo language change faster