ArticleLinguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal2021
Communicative efficiency and differential case marking: a reverse-engineering approach.
Article in Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Agreement Marking May Facilitate Noun Class Learning in Children But Not Adults.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Mark the Unexpected! Animacy Preference and Directed Movement in Visual Language.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- The Impact of Information Structure on the Emergence of Differential Object Marking: An Experimental Study.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Cross-Linguistic Trade-Offs and Causal Relationships Between Cues to Grammatical Subject and Object, and the Problem of Efficiency-Related Explanations.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
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Abstract
The use of differential case marking of A and P has been explained in terms of efficiency (economy) and markedness. The present study tests predictions based on these accounts, using conditional probabilities of a particular feature given the syntactic role (cue availability), and conditional probabilities of a particular syntactic role given the feature in question (cue reliability). Cue availability serves as a measure of markedness, whereas cue reliability is central for the efficiency account. Similar to reverse engineering, we determine which of the probabilistic measures could have been responsible for the recurrent cross-linguistic patterns described in the literature. The probabilities are estimated from spontaneous informal dialogues in English and Russian (Indo-European), Lao (Tai-Kadai), N||ng (Tuu) and Ruuli (Bantu). The analyses, which involve a series of mixed-effects Poisson models, clearly demonstrate that cue reliability matches the observed cross-linguistic patterns better than cue availability. Thus, the results support the efficiency account of differential marking.
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