This book examines one of the allegedly unique features of human language: structure sensitivity. Its point of departure is the distinction between content and structural units, which are defined in psycholinguistic terms. The focus of the book is on structural representations, in particular their hierarchicalness and their branching direction. Structural representations reach variable levels of activation and are therefore gradient in nature. Their variable strength is claimed to account for numerous effects including differences between individual analytical levels, differences between languages as well as pathways of language acquisition and breakdown. English is found to be consistent in its branching direction and to have evolved its branching direction in line with the cross-level harmony constraint. Structure sensitivity is argued to be highly variable both within and across languages and consequently an unlikely candidate for a defining property of human language.

Thomas Berg is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and is the author of Language Structure and Change.

Preface

Chapter One: A Structural Model of Language Production

Chapter Two: Constituent Structure and Branching Direction in English

Chapter Three: Level-specific Differences in Hierarchicalness

Chapter Four: Structural Variation across Time

Chapter Five: Structural Variation across Languages

Chapter Six: Branching Direction (and Hierarchicalness) from a Typological Perspective

Chapter Seven: How Structure is Acquired

Chapter Eight: How Structure Breaks Down

Chapter Nine: Structure across Output Modalities

Chapter Ten: The Whys and Wherefores of Structure

Notes

Bibliography

Index