Bresnan, Joan: Lexical Sharing in LFG meets Usage-based Linguistics: On English tensed auxiliary contraction

At first sight, formal theories of grammar like LFG and usage-based grammar appear completely opposed in their fundamental assumptions (Diessel 2007). If grammatical structures emerge from language use and are constantly changing through psychological processing, as usage-based grammar claims, how can they be formalized as a closed and stable system like LFG, independent of use? As one step toward answering this question, I will argue that Wescoat’s (2002, 2005) theory of lexical sharing provides insights into how we might combine major findings from formal and usage-based lines of research on tensed auxiliary contraction in English to explain their puzzling properties:

1. tensed auxiliary contraction is bidirectionally prosodified, showing segmental phonological dependence on its host in the left context, like an enclitic, and metrical dependence on its adjacent syntactic phrase in the right context, like a proclitic;
2. restricted’ auxiliary contraction, which shows irregular morphophonology supporting a lexical analysis fusing the host and auxiliary, shares both grammatical and information-theoretic properties of ‘unrestricted’ (syntactically productive, not to say promiscuous) auxiliary contraction;
3. the boundary between restricted and unrestricted auxiliary contraction is eroded;
4. lexical sharing captures properties common to restricted contractions and the I dunno construction of Bybee & Sheibman (1999) and Sheibman (2000).

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December 22, 2022