Doctoral Dissertation Research: Optionality in Comparative Inflection

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Although cognitive scientists over the past hundred years have greatly expanded our knowledge of language, the quintessential human adaptation, we are still quite far from solid, complete answers to most of the fundamental questions in the field: e.g., how are languages learned, and how are they represented and processed in the mind? Under the direction of Dr. Farrell Ackerman, Mr. Jeremy Boyd will address these vital questions by focusing on a small, well-defined area of English grammar: the alternation that occurs for some adjectives in the comparative between "-er" and "more" forms, e.g. "angrier" versus "more angry." Instances like these, in which competing forms are completely equivalent in terms of meaning, are referred to as examples of "grammatical optionality." The study of comparative optionality has the potential to shed new light on some of the oldest and thorniest issues in language research. Because forms that participate in optional relationships are absolutely identical in terms of meaning, it is possible to tease apart the syntactic, semantic, and processing factors that speakers consider when choosing one form over the other. This same property also allows researchers to see more clearly how processing preferences interact with learning over the course of development. Optional comparative forms have no fixed "-er" or "more" targets that children are trying to achieve. This means, for example, that the choice of "more mellow" over "mellower" at around age seven potentially reveals the underlying mental representation that seven-year-olds are entertaining, a general "more+ADJ" pattern of inflection. The ultimate goal in this line of research is to use the insights garnered from experimental work with children and adults to inform a new theory of word formation, one that is flexible enough to account for the facts presented by the phenomenon of optionality, but rigorous enough to make testable predictions about the nature of the language faculty.