Wayne Cowart | University of Southern Maine (original) (raw)
Papers by Wayne Cowart
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax
The work was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (1 R01 NS22606-0... more The work was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (1 R01 NS22606-01) to the second author. Additional support was provided to the first author as a grant from the Honors Program at Ohio State.
Linguistic theory traditionally relies on evidence from acceptability judgments, which are typica... more Linguistic theory traditionally relies on evidence from acceptability judgments, which are typically obtained in an informal, intuitive fashion. Wayne Cowart's book discusses potential problems with this informal approach and introduces a framework for eliciting judgment based on standard methods from experimental psychology.
Language, 1994
Languages of the mind: Essays on mental representation. By RAY JACKENDOFF. Cambridge, MA: MIT Pre... more Languages of the mind: Essays on mental representation. By RAY JACKENDOFF. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Pp. ix, 200. Cloth $25.00. Reviewed by WAYNE COWART, University of Southern Maine Jackendoff has been developing a story about ...
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 41-50
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1162 002438999554174, Mar 13, 2006
The Evolution of Language, 2008
412 evident in the subordinate cases are explainable in detail in terms of syntactic and morphosy... more 412 evident in the subordinate cases are explainable in detail in terms of syntactic and morphosyntactic properties, while the coordinate structures showed no evidence that the structural position or morphological details of material in the coordinates affected judgments. In particular, the ...
This paper suggests that some features of the syntactic and semantic structure of sentences somet... more This paper suggests that some features of the syntactic and semantic structure of sentences sometimes influence the phonemic analyses assigned to stretches of speech by the perceptual system. It is argued that the role of higher-order levels of linguistic analysis in speech perception can be productively studied.
One possible approach to the study of the evolution of language is to try to identify in modern l... more One possible approach to the study of the evolution of language is to try to identify in modern language so-called linguistic "fossils", i.e. traces of earlier stages of the phylogenetic development of language (Jackendoff, 2002). Here we explore the possibility that coordination is such an evolutionary leftover. Although coordinates are one of the most common syntactic structures, they manifest a complex network of problems that challenges many, perhaps all, contemporary generative frameworks. This is so in virtue of the fact that coordinates seem to violate many of the expectations that arise from taking subordinating structures as the core of the syntactic system, what is termed "narrow syntax" (recursion or Merge in the Minimalist Program) (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, 2002). Cowart and McDaniel propose that the eccentricities of coordination can be accounted for by viewing coordination as a linguistic fossil, a remainder from an earlier stage of language evolu...
Language, 2015
We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems.... more We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems. Hawkins (2014) and others who have advanced this idea focus primarily on parsing. Our extension focuses on production, and we use that to explore explanations for certain subject/object asymmetries in extraction structures. The phenomenon we examine, which we term the mirror asymmetry, runs in opposite directions for within-clause and across-clause (long-distance) extraction, showing a preference for subject extraction in the former and for object extraction in the latter. We review several types of evidence suggesting that the mirror asymmetry and related phenomena are best explained by an account of the formation of grammars that assigns an important role to properties of sentence planning in production.*
Page 1. How to Merge abruptly, silently, and successfully Wayne Cowart ... of dates. Arguably the... more Page 1. How to Merge abruptly, silently, and successfully Wayne Cowart ... of dates. Arguably the most dramatic consequence of the Merge innovation is that it enabledhumans to function as 'information-fixing' organisms. This derives ...
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax
The work was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (1 R01 NS22606-0... more The work was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (1 R01 NS22606-01) to the second author. Additional support was provided to the first author as a grant from the Honors Program at Ohio State.
Linguistic theory traditionally relies on evidence from acceptability judgments, which are typica... more Linguistic theory traditionally relies on evidence from acceptability judgments, which are typically obtained in an informal, intuitive fashion. Wayne Cowart's book discusses potential problems with this informal approach and introduces a framework for eliciting judgment based on standard methods from experimental psychology.
Language, 1994
Languages of the mind: Essays on mental representation. By RAY JACKENDOFF. Cambridge, MA: MIT Pre... more Languages of the mind: Essays on mental representation. By RAY JACKENDOFF. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Pp. ix, 200. Cloth $25.00. Reviewed by WAYNE COWART, University of Southern Maine Jackendoff has been developing a story about ...
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 41-50
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1162 002438999554174, Mar 13, 2006
The Evolution of Language, 2008
412 evident in the subordinate cases are explainable in detail in terms of syntactic and morphosy... more 412 evident in the subordinate cases are explainable in detail in terms of syntactic and morphosyntactic properties, while the coordinate structures showed no evidence that the structural position or morphological details of material in the coordinates affected judgments. In particular, the ...
This paper suggests that some features of the syntactic and semantic structure of sentences somet... more This paper suggests that some features of the syntactic and semantic structure of sentences sometimes influence the phonemic analyses assigned to stretches of speech by the perceptual system. It is argued that the role of higher-order levels of linguistic analysis in speech perception can be productively studied.
One possible approach to the study of the evolution of language is to try to identify in modern l... more One possible approach to the study of the evolution of language is to try to identify in modern language so-called linguistic "fossils", i.e. traces of earlier stages of the phylogenetic development of language (Jackendoff, 2002). Here we explore the possibility that coordination is such an evolutionary leftover. Although coordinates are one of the most common syntactic structures, they manifest a complex network of problems that challenges many, perhaps all, contemporary generative frameworks. This is so in virtue of the fact that coordinates seem to violate many of the expectations that arise from taking subordinating structures as the core of the syntactic system, what is termed "narrow syntax" (recursion or Merge in the Minimalist Program) (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, 2002). Cowart and McDaniel propose that the eccentricities of coordination can be accounted for by viewing coordination as a linguistic fossil, a remainder from an earlier stage of language evolu...
Language, 2015
We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems.... more We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems. Hawkins (2014) and others who have advanced this idea focus primarily on parsing. Our extension focuses on production, and we use that to explore explanations for certain subject/object asymmetries in extraction structures. The phenomenon we examine, which we term the mirror asymmetry, runs in opposite directions for within-clause and across-clause (long-distance) extraction, showing a preference for subject extraction in the former and for object extraction in the latter. We review several types of evidence suggesting that the mirror asymmetry and related phenomena are best explained by an account of the formation of grammars that assigns an important role to properties of sentence planning in production.*
Page 1. How to Merge abruptly, silently, and successfully Wayne Cowart ... of dates. Arguably the... more Page 1. How to Merge abruptly, silently, and successfully Wayne Cowart ... of dates. Arguably the most dramatic consequence of the Merge innovation is that it enabledhumans to function as 'information-fixing' organisms. This derives ...