Abstract :
[en] Language is systemically redundant. That is, it often boasts several strategies to perform the same function (Van de Velde 2014). For instance, to form plurals, German may use an -e ending, as in Hund ~ Hunde ‘dog’, an -s ending, as in Hotel ~ Hotels ‘hotel’, an -en ending, as in Rechnung ~ Rechnungen ‘bill’ and so on. Similarly, to form the past tense, Dutch may use ablaut, as in bid ~ bad ‘pray’ or a -de suffix, as in graaf ~ graafde ‘digged’. However, such systemic redundancy does not entail syntagmatic redundancy. In other words, it is not necessarily the case that the various strategies are combined in one and the same utterance. In fact, double forms such as Dutch begin ~ begonde, lit. ‘begin ~ ‘began ed’, appear quite rare (De Smet 2021: 83). The reason seems obvious: such redundant marking is superfluous, und would unnecessarily burden production processing (Sinnemäki 2009; Kurumada and Jaeger 2015; Leufkens 2015). As such, syntagmatic redundancy would be avoided for reasons of efficiency. This may be done either directly by language users, or by grammar evolving in such a way that various strategies strictly complement one another, and do not overlap. However, it has also been argued that syntagmatic redundancy is actually useful and therefore common, because (i) it enhances the robustness of the linguistic signal against information loss (Fedzechkina et al. 2012: 17897; Levshina 2021: 3), and (ii) it increases learnability (Sloutsky and Robinson 2013; Tal and Arnon 2022).
We test these competing accounts by investigating agent-recipient disambiguation in English and Dutch. These languages may employ the same four morphosyntactic strategies to distinguish agents from recipients, viz.
(i) Constituent order, e.g. Morgen kan je mijn baas niet zomaar een uitbrander geven.
(ii) Nominal marking, e.g. Mijn baas kan jij morgen niet zomaar een uitbrander geven.
(iii) Verbal agreement, e.g. Mijn baas kun je morgen niet zomaar een uitbrander geven.
(iv) Prepositional marking, e.g. Aan mijn baas kan je morgen niet zomaar een uitbrander geven.
All: ‘You can’t just give my boss a telling-off tomorrow.’
Under the efficiency account, we expect combinations of these strategies to be rare, and single marking to be common. Under the redundancy account, we conversely expect multiple marking to be the default. We investigate this case study using both present-day corpus data from Dutch (Oostdijk et al. 2013) and English (Röthlisberger 2018). While both languages employ the same strategies, they crucially do so in different ways. Dutch generally allows more leeway to the individual language producers to decide whether or not to apply a certain strategy, as may be glanced from the examples in (i)-(iv). Meanwhile, in English, this choice is determined to a larger degree by grammar, with only prepositional marking really being optional for the language producer. In addition to this synchronic comparison, we also investigate the usage of these strategies throughout the development of English, using the Penn Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (Kroch et al. 2000).
