Structure building in language production

Language production is one of the two primary ways in which we use our grammatical knowledge. However, compared to our understanding of how comprehenders parse sentences, how speakers build sentence structures for speaking remains poorly understood. In this talk, I make two main claims about the nature of structure building processes during sentence production. First, I argue that speakers represent highly abstract structural representations of sentences, whose nature is surprisingly well captured by existing syntactic theories that were developed primarily to explain cross-linguistic acceptability judgment patterns. I present two lines of work supporting this claim: one on structural priming, and another on the recently explored phenomenon that the overt complementizer that is more likely to be omitted when it is in the path of an A-bar dependency. Second, I argue that the notion of locality in syntax shows an interesting parallel with the notion of planning units in sentence production. This claim is based on a recent series of studies suggesting that speakers manipulate structural units that can be construed as domains of locality under a particular syntactic theory, namely Tree Adjoining Grammar. I conclude by sketching a theory of structure building in language production integrating these two claims.

Location: Fowler Museum A139