Previous studies on Preferred Argument Structure have suggested (Du Bois 1987, 2002) and accepted (e.g. Goldberg 2004) specific cognitive motivations for PAS, namely that the general restriction of lexical arguments and new referents to the S and O roles facilitates the conceptually onerous task of referent introduction. In this paper, conversation data from English and Portuguese are analyzed. The data are generally inconsistent with the putative cognitive motivations for PAS presented in the literature. They suggest instead that PAS is most likely epiphenomenal and due to basic semantic and pragmatic factors, for example the correlation between human referents and given/non-lexical arguments, and the correlation between human referents and the A role.
2017. Do grammatical relations reflect information status? Reassessing Preferred Argument Structure theory against discourse data from Tondano. Linguistic Typology 21:1
Fedden, Sebastian
2022. Agreement and argument realization in Mian discourse. Word Structure 15:3 ► pp. 283 ff.
Haig, Geoffrey, Stefan Schnell & Claudia Wegener
2011. Chapter 4. Comparing corpora from endangered language projects: Explorations in language typology based on original texts. In Documenting Endangered Languages, ► pp. 55 ff.
Hodge, Gabrielle, Lindsay N. Ferrara & Benjamin D. Anible
2019. The semiotic diversity of doing reference in a deaf signed language. Journal of Pragmatics 143 ► pp. 33 ff.
Irwin, Patricia
2018. Existential unaccusativity and new discourse referents. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1
Jiang, Xiangyu & Liang Chen
2019. Preferred argument structure in the narratives of Chinese-English bilinguals and their monolingual peers. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:5 ► pp. 873 ff.
2018. The diachrony of morphosyntactic alignment. Language and Linguistics Compass 12:9 ► pp. e12300 ff.
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