Cognitively oriented approaches to the study of language standardly use synchronic distributional evidence to make assumptions both about the psychological mechanisms that lead speakers to create particular constructions, and about the components of a speaker’s mental representation of their language. Yet, as synchronic distributional patterns are a result of specific diachronic processes, any assumption about the psychological mechanisms or types of mental representation underlying particular patterns should take into account the diachronic processes that give rise to these patterns. Based on evidence from different languages and language families, the paper discusses several diachronic processes pertaining to the development of various types of alignment systems and prototype effects in dependent clauses. It is shown that these processes provide no evidence for a number of assumptions about psychological mechanisms and a speaker’s mental representation that have been made on synchronic grounds in order to account for the relevant distributional patterns. It follows that this type of assumptions cannot be inferred directly from synchronic distributional patterns, and should be investigated independently of these patterns.
2016. When variables align: A Bayesian multinomial mixed-effects model of English permissive constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 27:2 ► pp. 235 ff.
Mauri, Caterina & Andrea Sansò
2019. Nouns & co. Converging evidence in the analysis of associative plurals. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 72:4 ► pp. 603 ff.
Seržant, Ilja A.
2021. Cyclic changes in verbal person-number indexes are unlikely. Folia Linguistica 55:s42-s1 ► pp. 49 ff.
Seržant, Ilja A. & George Moroz
2022. Universal attractors in language evolution provide evidence for the kinds of efficiency pressures involved. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 9:1
Sinnemäki, Kaius
2014. Cognitive processing, language typology, and variation. WIREs Cognitive Science 5:4 ► pp. 477 ff.
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