27.09.2023Guest lecture by Caroline Andrews on "Optionality and Commitment: Sentence Planning in an Ergative Language"

Caroline Andrews is giving a talk about"Optionality and Commitment: Sentence Planning in an Ergative Language" at the FALCoN (Formal Approaches to Language in Cognitive Neuroscience) Lab Guest Lectures conference. You can find more information about the conference on their website.

Shipibo-Konibo is a Panoan language of the Peruvian Amazon known for its unusually high commitment to ergative case alignment, which has put it at the center of debates about case assignment and syntactic ergativity.  Using eyetracking with a picture description paradigm, we investigate the sentence planning mechanisms that underlie ergative alignment. Previous studies of sentence planning in ergative languages have suggested that because planning an ergative case marker commits the speaker to producing a transitive sentence, speakers plan farther ahead to ensure that they will be able to meet that commitment. By comparing Shipibo to other ergative languages, we show that ergativity does not always imply the same planning strategies. In particular, optionality within constructions, as well as across languages, is a critical factor that changes the visual information that speakers draw on to plan their sentence. At the same time, we demonstrate how psycholinguistic studies can be used to complement and extend traditional fieldwork for documentation purposes.