Extending Processability Theory

Pienemann, M., Di Biase, B. and Kawaguchi, S. (2005). Extending Processability Theory. In M. Pienemann (ed.), Cross-Linguistic Aspects of Processability Theory, pp. 199-251. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

While all three authors looked at and worked on the overall article, Kawaguchi‟s contribution focused on the development of the Lexical Mapping area (cf. Kawaguchi, 2005), but her overall contribution was particularly important as her work focused on Japanese, a language that is both Topic prominent and Subject prominent (Li and Thompson, 1976). Needless to say, the overall fit and coherence for the extension could not have been achieved without the theoretical import of the architect himself of the original PT, Pienemann, who could see how each new component might fit within the architecture of PT and could test their plausibility from a broader psycholinguistic and SLA research perspective.

My contribution to § 2.2 is substantial throughout, I believe. I helped with the formulation of the Unmarked Alignment Hypothesis as an initial ordering principle for learners to move on to various degrees of additions and disruptions of the canonical order, as they learn to attribute grammatical functions correctly and then master discourse- pragmatic choices. One form of this hypothesis was already part and parcel of the original PT (cf. Pienemann, 1998, 84-5), with concepts such as „serial order strategy‟ used to “map semantics onto linguistic form,” negotiate procedural gaps and organise canonical schema. The current formulation owes as much to Pinker (1984, 1989) as to recent Optimality Theory work done within LFG (e.g. the collection of articles in Sells, 2001).

The Unmarked Alignment Hypothesis, whose title Pienemann selected against contenders such as „initial state‟, or „initial hypothesis of syntax‟, for instance (cf. Platzack, 1994), signals that PT does not subscribe to a single and rigid universal canonical order, as Bohnacker (2006, 447) still appears to believe. In fact it accommodates Japanese (head-last for L2 as well as L1 acquisition) and in principle any other language. It is not unreasonable to believe, pace Bohnacker, that the canonical order (of a language) is easier to process than alternative orders in the same language, as has been found experimentally (e.g. Sasaki, 1998 for Japanese native and non-

native speakers, or Weyerts, Penke, Münte, Heinze, and Clahsen, 2002 for German natives).

In regard to the topic hypothesis, Italian is known as a pro-drop language while most of the other languages described in earlier PT (German, Swedish, English) are non pro-drop. Italian word order is also particularly sensitive to discourse focus, and it prefers topicalisation to passivisation when giving thematic prominence to an argument of the verb. I looked at these phenomena from the point of view of having to learn them in the L2 and came to the conclusion that the learning of topic/focus discourse functions obeys processing constraints and their development can be predicted much as in the original version of PT. Indeed this hypothesis, introducing Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG)‟s notion of functional uncertainty (Bresnan, 2001, 64-9) to developmental issues, helped better characterise how learners gradually proceed from a canonical order position.

Similarly, the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis, which utilises other LFG developments, refined in collaboration with Satomi Kawaguchi and Manfred Pienemann, utilises the same learning principle of developing from default mapping to more marked and special mappings. Again, Pinker‟s (1984) work on first language acquisition turned out to be seminal, where he introduced the notion of „exceptional verbs‟, i.e. verbs such as receive which map the Beneficiary (rather than the Agent/giver) on the Subject. Similarly the L2 learner starts from canonically-mapping verbs (Agent/Experiencer on Subject, Patient/Theme on Object) and gradually learns that not all verbs behave that way. One more general issue which these new hypotheses help resolve, with the help of LFG‟s formalism incorporating discourse functions and Lexical Mapping Theory, is that PT is now able to shed the „saliency‟ explanation (Pienemann, 2005c, 65-66) to which it made recourse for a series of „fronting‟ and other phenomena in German L216 _{and English L2} development.17 _{Psycholinguistic research (as reviewed in Levelt, 1989)} also indicates that languages tend to reserve for Topic the first (or in any case an early) position in the clause. In language processing, the topic is determined before lexical access and is often mapped on the subject, but, depending on the perspective adopted, it may be

16

This was one remaining element of Clahsen‘s ‗strategies‘ approach, otherwise rejected in the original (1998) PT version. Pienemann (2005c, 65-66) explains: ―In Chapter 7 Pienemann, Di Biase and Kawaguchi propose that the revised version of LFG (Bresnan, 2001) contains a set of principles that permit a parsimonious explanation of the phenomena previously explained with reference to the saliency principle.‖

17

Cf. Larsen-Freeman and Long‘s (1991) excellent explanation of what Long named the ‗predictive framework‘, on the basis of conference presentations and published work by Pienemann and Johnston in the mid 1980s.

mapped on other grammatical functions, such as the object or an adjunct, and it may participate in different constructions (active, passive and so on). Learning to assign the topic function in the L2 will involve, then, lexical, syntactic and/or morphological operations (including „fronting‟, dislocation, morphological marking and others) which are likely to be language-specific in their distribution. That is what English may preferentially express with a passive construction (involving the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis), and Italian may preferentially express with word order choices (involving the Topic Hypothesis).

The language learner will then need to build those processing resources that allow for lexical mapping and discourse functions to be correctly marked in the target language and respond to language- specific discourse-pragmatic requirements. PT is now in a better position to look at integrating discourse pragmatic variables in its research.

Pienemann, M., Di Biase, B. and Kawaguchi, S. (2005). Extending Processability Theory. In M. Pienemann (ed.), Cross-Linguistic Aspects of Processability Theory, pp. 199-251. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

The original version of Processability Theory (PT) focused on modelling the transfer of grammatical information within c(onstituent) structure on the basis of feature unification, utilising a simplified version of f(unctional) structure. In this chapter we will explore ways in which linguistic non-linearity can be modelled by including further aspects of f-structure and Lexical Mapping Theory (i.e. the mapping of a(rgument) structure onto f-structure), in order to prepare the way for an extended approach that can capture a wider range of linguistic phenomena, including passives, causatives, topicalisation and so-called ‗exceptional lexical entries‘ (such as ―receive‖or ―please‖). The extension of the scope of PT should be seen as a sketch of a future research program.