B. MacWhinney, A. Malchukov, and E. Moravcsik (eds): Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage

This book is a fascinating, rich collection of papers (21 in total) dealing with the role of competition in syntax (Part I), morphology and the lexicon (Part II), as well as the nature of competition more generally (Part III). The term ‘competition’, as is explained in the introductory Chapter 1 by Edith Moravcsik, is used with reference to generalizations, called motivations here, that make conflicting predictions. For example, in English we distinguish between three genders in the third-person singular ( he , she , it ). Analogy or ‘Paradigmatic Uniformity’ may thus lead us to expect that three genders are also distinguished in the plural, which instead is more ‘economical’, consisting only of one form ( they ). In other words, in this specific instance, the competition between Economy and Paradigmatic Uniformity is resolved by the former trumping the latter. The present collection investigates numerous cases of competition and how they are resolved both within single languages and across languages, both synchronically and diachronically. A considerable amount of attention is also devoted to competition in first language acquisition although little is found on second language acquisition (SLA). In general, however, the editors, Brian MacWhinney, Andrej Malchukov, and Edith Moravcsik, have succeeded in creating a coherent whole from the various chapters, as is evident from abundant cross-referencing and the inclusion of a concluding chapter (Chapter 22) by MacWhinney, who develops a theory of ‘timeframe integration’ which consistently refers back to the previous contributions. Although the book is not specifically aimed at applied linguists and, indeed, the applied dimension of the ideas is not extensively discussed, I believe that applied linguists may benefit from at least perusing this collection, and engaging with its central premise: that competition is omnipresent in, indeed is an integral part of, the linguistic system. In this sense, some chapters are likely to be more relevant than others to the applied linguist’s concerns. Hence, given the breadth of the book, its eminently theoretical stance and the length constraints on this review, it is on those chapters that I will focus here.

Part I is the longest section of the book, with nine contributions. It opens with Chapter 2 by Andrej Malchukov, who discusses crosslinguistic variation in alignment patters (e.g. accusative vs. ergative alignment). Chapter 3 (‘Animate object fronting in Dutch: A production study’) by Monique Lamers and Helen De Hoop is more central to the field of applied linguistics. It studies the interplay in Dutch between the tendency to start a sentence with a subject (which is not always necessarily animate) and the tendency to start a sentence with an animate noun phrase (which is not always necessarily a subject). This is obviously a phenomenon with potential implications for learners of Dutch as a second language.

The next chapter, Chapter 4 by John Hawkins, is the only chapter in the book which explicitly mentions SLA (in its last section, Section 4.5), although the reader is referred to Hawkins and Filipović (2012) for an exhaustive exposition. Although it is useful to see these links made, the section in question strikes me as too much of an add-on in the overall economy of Hawkins’s contribution and frankly runs the risk of sounding too commonsensical and/or too sketchy. Hawkins observes, for example, that frequent properties as well as features shared by the L1 and the L2 are learned more easily and that learners tend to avoid transferring features which would possibly result in a communication breakdown. For instance, Japanese learners of English do not appear to transfer the head-final patterns of their language into English (e.g. the cinema to went for went to the cinema ) because this would hinder efficient communication. Instead, Spanish-style variants such as I read yesterday the book for I read the book yesterday are found in L2 data because they do not affect efficient communication. However, Hawkins does not explain how learners know which features would result in a communication breakdown in the first place. I appreciate that this section is just a sketch and its value lies in the idea that SLA involves competition but the whole subsection appears too limited in scope and rather simplistic in nature. In my view, it would have been useful to include a whole chapter devoted to SLA issues.

Both Chapter 5 (‘Why move? How weight and discourse factors combine to predict relative clause extraposition in English’) by Elaine Francis and Laura Michaelis and Chapter 6 (‘A statistical model of competing motivations affecting relative clause extraposition in German’) by Jan Strunk, as is indicated in the titles, deal with relative clause extraposition, although Strunk’s analysis takes into account many more possible factors than Francis and Michaelis’s. Both concur, however, that a full picture can be arrived at only by making reference to a competition model between various factors. As was the case with the study by Lamers and De Hoop, it would be interesting to extend this type of investigation to second-language learners as well.

The remaining chapters in Part I deal with a neurobiological analysis of competition in language production (in Chapter 7, by Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewky and Matthias Schlesewsky) and competition in child language acquisition, which is discussed in the last three Chapters. Chapter 8 (‘Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning’) is by Caroline Rowland, Claire Noble, and Angel Chan, Chapter 9 (‘Competing motivations in children’s omission of subjects? The interaction between verb finiteness and referent accessibility’) is by Mary Hughes and Shanley Allen and Chapter 10 (‘Competing cues in early syntactic developments’) is by Grzegorz Krajewski and Elena Lieven. The titles of the contributions are self-explanatory as to the topics addressed. Still, it may be worth pointing out that Krajewski and Lieven’s chapter highlights, among other things, the importance of prototypes in syntactic development, which may, of course, also be relevant in SLA, see, for example, Ellis (2013) for a short summary.

Part II explores competition in morphosyntax and the lexicon. It opens with a study (Chapter 11) by Wolfgang Dressler, Gary Libbern, and Katharina Korecky-Kröll addressing various types of motivation (called ‘conflicting’, ‘convergent’, and ‘interdependent’). The next contribution, Chapter 12, by Martin Haspelmath, discusses the competition between ‘economy’ and ‘system pressure’. For example, it is well-known that singular nouns are usually shorter than plurals ( book vs. books ) because they are (usually) less frequent (‘economy’) but this is so also with nouns such as eyes , which are more frequent in the plural. Haspelmath argues that the reason for such cases is ‘system pressure’, by virtue of which elements belonging to the same class tend to behave similarly. Chapter 13 (‘Apparently competing motivations in morphosyntactic variation’), by Britta Mondorf, discusses mainly synthetic and analytic comparatives (e.g. fuller vs. more full ) but also the English genitive alternation ( the topic’s relevance vs. the relevance of the topic ), the English future tense alternation ( will vs. going to ), the English mood alternation ( if he agree vs. if he agrees vs. if he should agree ), the Spanish future tense alternation ( comeré vs. voy a comer ), and the German past alternation ( Sie brauchte vs. Sie hat… gebraucht ). Mondorf proposes that a division of labour or ‘Separation’ takes place by which syntheticity is favoured when the processing load is low and analyticity prevails when the processing load is high. This is also an area worth investigating in SLA. The remaining two contributions in Part II are also relevant to applied linguistics. Chapter 14 by Martin Pfeiffer is an interesting study of self-repair in German, where it is argued that ‘the structure of self-repair is not shaped by syntactic features alone, but also by functional motivations from interaction and cognition’ (p. 244). Finally, John Haiman in Chapter 15 studies speech production from the perspective of the hearer rather than the speaker by investigating (with specific reference to Cambodian) the nature of repetition, that is, why repetition is used.

Part III contains some of the most theoretical chapters of the volume. The first contribution, Chapter 16, by John Du Bois, discusses the nature of motivation, highlighting its dynamic nature, that is, the fact that it takes place in real time. Although it does not address applied linguistic issues, the next chapter, Chapter 17, by Sonia Cristofaro is in my view one of the most stimulating contributions in the whole volume because it challenges accounts based on motivation in the development of patterns such as singular vs. plural marking, which was discussed by Haspelmath in Part II. Also interesting is John Newmeyer’s Chapter 18, where he claims that the linkage between specific grammatical properties and functional motivations is indirect: ‘[n]o rule or constraint has a motivation in and of itself, but only within the total system in which it occurs, and crucially, in the history of that system’ (p. 313). Chapter 19 by Johannes Helmbrecht is closer to applied linguists’ interests in that it discusses politeness distinctions in personal pronouns in Europe, in particular the emergence and spread of the second person plural as a second person singular honorific (as in French vous ). He argues that three competing factors are involved: politeness, prestige, and economy. Applied linguists may also find the next two contributions relevant. Chapter 20, by Mira Ariel, studies how disjunction is expressed in discourse. Chapter 21 (‘Sentence grammar vs. thetical grammar: Two competing domains?’) by Gunther Kaltenböck and Bernd Heine, discusses ‘theticals’, that is, those expressions that ‘temporarily disrupt the structure of another construction and in this way add an extra plane of communication which in some form relates to the immediate discourse situation’ (p. 349). Theticals, thus, include constructions such as comments clauses ( I guess ), reporting clauses ( he said ), and tag questions ( didn’t we ), among others. Kaltenböck and Heine conclude that theticals make up a domain of their own, separate from that of ‘sentence grammar’. It goes without saying that it would be of great interest to study the topics addressed in these two chapters also from an L2 perspective, for example. The volume, as was pointed out above, concludes with the contribution by Brian MacWhinney.

All in all, although this book is not aimed directly at an applied linguistic readership, it may turn out to be of some importance in the field because, on a very general level, it stresses the central role played by competition in language and, more specifically, it may suggest research topics which, as I have remarked above, readily cross over into other fields, such as SLA.

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