Hostname: page-component-68c7f8b79f-xmwfq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-01-02T06:12:01.342Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Formal Grammar, Usage Probabilities, and Auxiliary Contraction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Joan Bresnan
Joan Bresnan*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Department of Linguistics and The Center for the Study of Language & Information (CSLI), Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, [bresnan@stanford.edu]
Get access

Abstract

This article uses formal and usage-based data and methods to argue for a hybrid model of English tensed auxiliary contraction combining lexical syntax with a dynamic exemplar lexicon. The hybrid model can explain why the contractions involve lexically specific phonetic fusions that have become morphologized and lexically stored, yet remain syntactically independent, and why the probability of contraction itself is a function of the adjacent cooccurrences of the subject and auxiliary in usage, yet is also subject to the constraints of the grammatical context. Novel evidence includes a corpus study and a formal analysis of a multiword expression of classic usage-based grammar.

Keywords

contractioncliticcorpusprobabilityLFGexemplarusage

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 108 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to several colleagues who helped me advance this study: to Jen Hay for making data for the corpus study available while I had a Strategic Fellowship at the New Zealand Institute for Language, Brain, and Behaviour in 2015; to Arto Anttila for his collaborations with me in corpus phonology and syntax from our joint Stanford course in 2012 and through summer projects in 2015 and 2017; to Adams Bodomo for his invitation and very generous support of my presentation at LFG '18 at the University of Vienna; to Avery Andrews, Joan Bybee, and Janet Pierrehumbert in particular among those who gave me comments on the first draft; and to the editorial team of this journal, including three anonymous referees who gave detailed and helpful comments on subsequent drafts.

References

Abbot-Smith, Kirsten, and Tomasello, Michael. 2006. Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition. The Linguistic Review 23. 275–90. DOI: 10.1515/TLR.2006.011.10.1515/TLR.2006.011CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abercrombie, David. 1961. Syllable quantity and enclitics in English. In honor of Daniel Jones: Papers contributed on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, 12 September 1961, ed. by Abercrombie, David, Fry, Dennis B., MacCarthy, Peter A. D., Scott, Norman C., and Trim, J. L. M., 216–22. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.Google Scholar
Alsina, Alex. 2010. The Catalan definite article as lexical sharing. Proceedings of the LFG '10 Conference, 5–25. Online: http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/15/papers/lfg10alsina.pdf.Google Scholar
Ambridge, Ben. 2020. Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition. First Language 40. 509–59. DOI: 10.1177/0142723719869731.10.1177/0142723719869731CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 2005. Aspects of the theory of clitics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199279906.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 2008. English reduced auxiliaries really are simple clitics. Lingue e linguaggio 7. 169–86. DOI: 10.1418/28094.Google Scholar
Anttila, Arto. 2017. Stress, phrasing, and auxiliary contraction in English. The morphosyntax-phonology connection: Locality and directionality at the interface, ed. by Gribanova, Vera and Shih, Stephanie, 143–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190210304.003.0006.Google Scholar
Anttila, Arto, Dozat, Timothy, Galbraith, Daniel; and Shapiro, Naomi. 2020. Sentence stress in presidential speeches. Prosody in syntactic encoding (Linguistische Arbeiten 573), ed. by Kentner, Gerrit and Kremers, Joost, 17–50. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110650532-002.10.1515/9783110650532-002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnon, Inbal, and Priva, Uriel Cohen. 2013. More than words: The effect of multi-word frequency and constituency on phonetic duration. Language and Speech 56. 349–71. DOI: 10.1177/0023830913484891.10.1177/0023830913484891CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baker, Carl L. 1971. Stress level and auxiliary behavior in English. Linguistic Inquiry 2. 167–81. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4177623.Google Scholar
Bannard, Colin, and Matthews, Danielle. 2008. Stored word sequences in language learning: The effect of familiarity on children's repetition of four-word combinations. Psychological Science 19. 241–48. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02075.x.10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02075.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barron, Julia. 1998. Have contraction: Explaining ‘trace effects’ in a theory without movement. Linguistics 36. 223–51. DOI: 10.1515/ling.1998.36.2.223.10.1515/ling.1998.36.2.223CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barth, Danielle. 2011. Modeling reduction of is, am and are in grammaticalized constructions. Quantitative Issues in Theoretical Linguistics (QITL) 4. 13–15. Online: https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/2016.Google Scholar
Barth, Danielle. 2019. Effects of average and specific context probability on reduction of function words BE and HAVE. Linguistics Vanguard 5:20180055. DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2018-0055.10.1515/lingvan-2018-0055CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barth, Danielle, and Kapatsinski, Vsevolod. 2017. A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: Construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 13. 203–60. DOI: 10.1515/cllt-2014-0022.10.1515/cllt-2014-0022CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bender, Emily M., and Sag, Ivan A.. 2001. Incorporating contracted auxiliaries in English. Grammatical interfaces in HPSG, ed. by Cann, Ronnie, Grover, Claire, and Miller, Philip, 1–15. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bod, Rens. 1998. Beyond grammar: An experience-based theory of language. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bod, Rens. 2006. Exemplar-based syntax: How to get productivity from examples. The Linguistic Review 23. 291–320. DOI: 10.1515/TLR.2006.012.10.1515/TLR.2006.012CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bod, Rens. 2009. From exemplar to grammar: A probabilistic analogy-based model of language learning. Cognitive Science 33. 752–93. DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01031.x.10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01031.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bod, Rens, and Kaplan, Ronald. 1998. A probabilistic corpus-driven model for lexical-functional analysis. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, vol. 1, 145–51. Online: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C98-1022.Google Scholar
Börjars, Kersti, Nordlinger, Rachel; and Sadler, Louisa. 2019. Lexical-functional grammar: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781316756584.10.1017/9781316756584CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 1971. Contraction and the transformational cycle in English. Cambridge, MA: MIT, ms. [Reproduced by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1978.].Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 1973. Syntax of the comparative clause construction in English. Linguistic Inquiry 4. 275–343. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4177775.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 2016. Linguistics: The garden and the bush. Computational Linguistics 42. 599–617. DOI: 10.1162/COLI_a_00260.10.1162/COLI_a_00260CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Asudeh, Ash, Toivonen, Ida; and Wechsler, Stephen. 2015. Lexical-functional syntax. 2nd edn. (Blackwell textbooks in linguistics.) Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9781119105664CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Cueni, Anna, Nikitina, Tatiana; and Baayen, R. Harald. 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. Cognitive foundations of interpretation, ed. by Bouma, Gerlof, Krämer, Irene, and Zwarts, Joost, 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, and Spencer, Jessica. 2012. Frequency effects in spoken syntax: Have and be contraction. Invited paper presented at the symposium on New Ways of Analyzing Syntactic Variation, Radboud University Nijmegen, 15–17 November 2012.Google Scholar
Broadwell, George Aaron. 2007. Lexical sharing and non-projecting words: The syntax of Zapotec adjectives. Proceedings of the LFG '07 Conference, 87–106. Online: http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/12/papers/lfg07broadwell.pdf.Google Scholar
Broadwell, George Aaron. 2008. Turkish suspended affixation is lexical sharing. Proceedings of the LFG '08 Conference, 198–213. Online: http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/13/papers/lfg08broadwell.pdf.Google Scholar
Brown, Roger. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.10.4159/harvard.9780674732469CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc, Stevens, Michaël, Mandera, Pawel; and Keuleers, Emmanuel. 2016. The impact of word prevalence on lexical decision times: Evidence from the Dutch Lexicon Project 2. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 42. 441–58. DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000159.Google ScholarPubMed
Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2000. The phonology of the lexicon: Evidence from lexical diffusion. Usage-based models of language, ed. by Barlow, Michael and Kemmer, Suzanne, 65–85. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511612886CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2002. Sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure. The evolution of language from pre-language, ed. by Givón, T. and Malle, Bertram F., 109–32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind's response to repetition. Language 82. 711–33. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2006.0186.10.1353/lan.2006.0186CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2010. Language, usage, and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511750526CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, and Hopper, Paul J. (eds.) 2001. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.45CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, and McClelland, James L.. 2005. Alternatives to the combinatorial paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of human cognition. The Linguistic Review 22. 381–410. DOI: 10.1515/tlir.2005.22.2-4.381.10.1515/tlir.2005.22.2-4.381CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, and Scheibman, Joanne. 1999. The effect of usage on degrees of constituency: The reduction of don't in English. Linguistics 37. 575–96. DOI: 10.1515/Ling.37.4.575.10.1515/ling.37.4.575CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary, Lowe, John J.; and Mycock, Louise. 2019. The Oxford reference guide to lexical functional grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780198733300.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008–. Corpus of Contemporary American English: 400+ million words, 1990–present. Online: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2007. Frequency effects in language acquisition, language use, and diachronic change. New Ideas in Psychology 25. 108–27. DOI: 10.1016/j.newideapsych.2007.02.002.10.1016/j.newideapsych.2007.02.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, Robert M. W. 1977. Semantic neutralization for phonological reasons. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 599–602. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178004.Google Scholar
Ernestus, Mirjam. 2014. Acoustic reduction and the roles of abstractions and exemplars in speech processing. Lingua 142. 27–41. DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.12.006.10.1016/j.lingua.2012.12.006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J., Kay, Paul; and O'Connor, Mary Catherine. 1988. Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Language 64. 501–38. DOI: 10.2307/414531.Google Scholar
Frank, Austin, and Jaeger, T. Florian. 2008. Speaking rationally: Uniform information density as an optimal strategy for language production. Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci '08), 939–44.Google Scholar
Gelman, Andrew, and Su, Yu-Sung. 2018. arm: Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. R package version 1. 10–1. Online: https://cran.r-project.org/package=arm.Google Scholar
German, James, Pierrehumbert, Janet Breckenridge; and Kaufmann, Stefan. 2006. Evidence for phonological constraints on nuclear accent placement. Language 82. 151–68. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2006.0035.10.1353/lan.2006.0035CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Godfrey, John J., and Holliman, Edward. 1997. Switchboard-1 release 2. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Elizabeth, Campbell, Lyle, Hay, Jennifer, Maclagan, Margaret, Sudbury, Andrea; and Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New Zealand English: Its origins and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harmon, Zara, and Kapatsinski, Vsevolod. 2017. Putting old tools to novel uses: The role of form accessibility in semantic extension. Cognitive Psychology 98. 22–44. DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.08.002.10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.08.002CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harrell, Frank E. Jr. 2001. Regression modeling strategies: With applications to linear models, logistic regression, and survival analysis. Dordrecht: Springer.10.1007/978-1-4757-3462-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrell, Frank E. Jr. 2018. rms: Regression modeling strategies. R package version 5. 1–2. Online: https://cran.r-project.org/package=rms.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, and Bresnan, Joan. 2006. Spoken syntax: The phonetics of giving a hand in New Zealand English. The Linguistic Review 23. 321–49. DOI: 10.1515/TLR.2006.013.10.1515/TLR.2006.013CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J., and Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139165525CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney, and Pullum, Geoffrey K.. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316423530CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon. 1991. Prosodic constituency in the lexicon. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon, and Zec, Draga. 1993. Auxiliary reduction without empty categories: A prosodic account. Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 8. 205–53. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3735001.Google Scholar
Ito, Junko, and Mester, Armin. 2018. Matching light elements. A reasonable way to proceed: Essays in honor of Jim McCloskey, ed. by Merchant, Jason, Mikkelsen, Line, Rudin, Deniz, and Sasaki, Kelsey, 168–90. Santa Cruz: University of California, Santa Cruz. Online: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z29n70x.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Cassandra L., Dell, Gary S., Benjamin, Aaron S.; and Bannard, Colin. 2016. Part and whole linguistic experience affect recognition memory for multiword sequences. Journal of Memory and Language 87. 38–58. DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.11.001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janssen, Niels, and Barber, Horacio A.. 2012. Phrase frequency effects in language production. PLoS ONE 7:e3320. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033202.10.1371/journal.pone.0033202CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaisse, Ellen M. 1979. Auxiliary reduction and the derivation of pseudoclefts. Linguistic Inquiry 10. 707–10. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178139.Google Scholar
Kaisse, Ellen M. 1983. The syntax of auxiliary reduction in English. Language 59. 93–122. DOI: 10.2307/414062.10.2307/414062CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaisse, Ellen M. 1985. Connected speech: The interaction of syntax and phonology. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott, Dilley, Laura; and Raymond, William D.. 2006. The Variation in Conversation (ViC) project: Creation of the Buckeye Corpus of conversational speech. Columbus: Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University. Online: https://buckeyecorpus.osu.edu/BuckeyeCorpusmanual.pdf.Google Scholar
King, Harold V. 1970. On blocking the rules for contraction in English. Linguistic Inquiry 1. 134–36. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4177538.Google Scholar
Klavans, Judith L. 1985. The independence of syntax and phonology in cliticization. Language 61. 95–120. DOI: 10.2307/413422.10.2307/413422CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krug, Manfred. 1998. String frequency: A cognitive motivating factor in coalescence, language processing, and linguistic change. Journal of English Linguistics 26. 286–320. DOI: 10.1177/007542429802600402.10.1177/007542429802600402CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1969. Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Language 45. 715–62. DOI: 10.2307/412333.10.2307/412333CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levelt, Willem J. M., Roelofs, Ardi; and Meyer, Antje S.. 1999. A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22. 1–38. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X99001776.10.1017/S0140525X99001776CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liberman, Mark, and Prince, Alan. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 249–336. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4177987.Google Scholar
Lowe, John J. 2016. English possessive 's: Clitic and affix. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34. 157–95. DOI: 10.1007/s11049-015-9300-1.10.1007/s11049-015-9300-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, Laurel E. 2012. Locating variation above the phonology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, Laurel E. 2013. Variation in English auxiliary realization: A new take on contraction. Language Variation and Change 25. 17–41. DOI: 10.1017/S0954394512000257.10.1017/S0954394512000257CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk: The database, vol. 2. Psychology Press: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
McElhinny, Bonnie S. 1993. Copula and auxiliary contraction in the speech of white Americans. American Speech 68. 371–99. DOI: 10.2307/455773.10.2307/455773CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mel'čuk, Igor. 1988. Dependency syntax: Theory and practice. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Nathan, Geoffrey S. 1981. What's these facts about? Linguistic Inquiry 12. 151–53. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178211.Google Scholar
Phillips, Betty S. 1984. Word frequency and the actuation of sound change. Language 60. 320–42. DOI: 10.2307/413643.10.2307/413643CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piantadosi, Steven T., Tily, Harry; and Gibson, Edward. 2011. Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108. 3526–62. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1012551108.10.1073/pnas.1012551108CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2001. Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition and contrast. In Bybee & Hopper, 137–57.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2002. Word-specific phonetics. Laboratory phonology 7, ed. by Gussenhoven, Carlos and Warner, Natasha, 101–40. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110197105.1.101.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2006. The next toolkit. Journal of Phonetics 34. 516–30. DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2006.06.003.10.1016/j.wocn.2006.06.003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pitt, Mark A., Johnson, Keith, Hume, Elizabeth, Kiesling, Scott; and Raymond, William. 2005. The Buckeye corpus of conversational speech: Labeling conventions and a test of transcriber reliability. Speech Communication 45. 89–95. DOI: 10.1016/j.specom.2004.09.001.10.1016/j.specom.2004.09.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Postal, Paul M. 1966. On so-called ‘pronouns’ in English. 17th Annual Round Table (Monograph series on language and linguistics), ed. by Dineen, Francis P., 177–206. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Online: https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/555459/GURT_1966.pdf.Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2019. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Online: https://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Rickford, John R., Ball, Arnetha, Blake, Renee, Jackson, Raina; and Martin, Nomi. 1991. Rappin on the copula coffin: Theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis of copula variation in African-American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change 3. 103–32. DOI: 10.1017/S0954394500000466.10.1017/S0954394500000466CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sadler, Louisa. 1998. English auxiliaries as tense inflections. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 24. 1–15.Google Scholar
Scheibman, Joanne. 2000. I dunno: A usage-based account of the phonological reduction of don't in American English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 32. 105–24. DOI: 10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00032-6.10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00032-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schütze, Hinrich. 1995. Distributional part-of-speech tagging. EACL '95: Proceedings of the seventh conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 141–48. DOI: 10.3115/976973.976994.10.3115/976973.976994.10.3115/976973.976994.10.3115/976973.976994CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schütze, Hinrich, Walsh, Michael, Möbius, Bernd; and Wade, Travis. 2007. Towards a unified exemplar-theoretic model of phonetic and syntactic phenomena. Proceedings of the 29th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2007), 1461–16.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 1972. The phrase phonology of English and French. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. Online: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/14788.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 1984. Phonology and syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 1996. The prosodic structure of function words. Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, ed. by Morgan, James L. and Demuth, Katherine, 187–214. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 2011. The syntax-phonology interface. The handbook of phonological theory, 2nd edn., ed. by Goldsmith, John, Riggle, Jason, and Yu, Alan, 435–83. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sells, Peter. 1993. Juncture and the phonology of auxiliary reduction in English. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 8. 76–105. Online: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/umop/vol8/iss1/6.Google Scholar
Seyfarth, Scott. 2014. Word informativity influences acoustic duration: Effects of contextual predictability on lexical representation. Cognition 133. 140–55. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.06.013.10.1016/j.cognition.2014.06.013CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shannon, C. E. 1948. A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal 27. 623–56. DOI: 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shao, Zeshu, Van Paridon, Jeroen, Poletiek, Fenna; and Meyer, Antje S.. 2019. Effects of phrase and word frequencies in noun phrase production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 45. 147–65. DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000570.Google ScholarPubMed
Simons, Gary F., and Fennig, Charles D.. 2018. Ethnologue: Languages of the world. 21st edn. Dallas: SIL International. Online: http://www.ethnologue.com.Google Scholar
Márton, Sóskuthy, and Hay, Jennifer. 2017. Changing word usage predicts changing word durations in New Zealand English. Cognition 166. 298–313. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.032.Google Scholar
Sparks, Randall B. 1984. Here's a few more facts. Linguistic Inquiry 15. 179–83. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178377.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 1991. Morphological theory: An introduction to word structure in generative grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Spencer, Jessica. 2014. Stochastic effects in the grammar: Toward a usage-based model of copula contraction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University dissertation.Google Scholar
Sternberg, Saul, Knoll, Ronald L., Monsell, Stephen; and Wright, Charles E.. 1988. Motor programs and hierarchical organization in the control of rapid speech. Phonetica 45. 175–97. DOI: 10.1159/000261825.10.1159/000261825CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sternberg, Saul, Monsell, Stephen, Knoll, Ronald L.; and Wright, Charles E.. 1978. The latency and duration of rapid movement sequences: Comparisons of speech and typewriting. Information processing in motor control and learning, ed. by Stelmach, George E., 117–52. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sweet, Henry. 1890. A primer of spoken English. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Szmrecsányi, Benedikt. 2004. On operationalizing syntactic complexity. Le poids des mots: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Textual Data Statistical Analysis, Louvain-la-Neuve, vol. 2, 1032–23.Google Scholar
Szmrecsányi, Benedikt. 2005. Language users as creatures of habit: A corpus-based analysis of persistence in spoken English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1. 113–50. DOI: 10.1515/cllt.2005.1.1.113.10.1515/cllt.2005.1.1.113CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Todd, Simon. 2019. The listener in language change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University dissertation.Google Scholar
Todd, Simon, Pierrehumbert, Janet B.; and Hay, Jennifer. 2019. Word frequency effects in sound change as a consequence of perceptual asymmetries: An exemplar-based model. Cognition 185. 1–20. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.01.004.10.1016/j.cognition.2019.01.004CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tremblay, Antoine, and Baayen, R. Harald. 2010. Holistic processing of regular four-word sequences: A behavioral and ERP study of the effects of structure, frequency, and probability on immediate free recall. Perspectives on formulaic language: Acquisition and communication, ed. by Wood, David, 151–73. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Walsh, Michael, Möbius, Bernd, Wade, Travis; and Schütze, Hinrich. 2010. Multilevel exemplar theory. Cognitive Science 34. 537–82. DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01099.x.10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01099.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wedekind, Jürgen, and Kaplan, Ronald M.. 2012. LFG generation by grammar specialization. Computational Linguistics 38. 867–915. DOI: 10.1162/COLI_a_00113.10.1162/COLI_a_00113CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wescoat, Michael T. 2002. On lexical sharing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University dissertation.Google Scholar
Wescoat, Michael T. 2005. English nonsyllabic auxiliary contractions: An analysis in LFG with lexical sharing. Proceedings of the LFG '05 Conference, 468–86. Online: http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublicationsLFG/10/pdfs/lfg05wescoat.pdf.Google Scholar
Wescoat, Michael T. 2007. Preposition-determiner contractions: An analysis in optimality-theoretic lexical-functional grammar with lexical sharing. Proceedings of the LFG '07 Conference, 439–59. Online: http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/12/papers/lfg07wescoat.pdf.Google Scholar
Wescoat, Michael T. 2009. Udi person markers and lexical integrity. Proceedings of the LFG '09 Conference, 604–22. Online: http://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/14/papers/lfg09wescoat.pdf.Google Scholar
Wilder, Chris. 1997. English finite auxiliaries in syntax and phonology. Clitics, pronouns, and movement, ed. by Black, James R. and Motapanyane, Virginia, 321–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wright, Saundra K., Hay, Jennifer; and Bent, Tessa. 2005. Ladies first? Phonology, frequency, and the naming conspiracy. Linguistics 43. 531–61. DOI: 10.1515/ling.2005.43.3.531.10.1515/ling.2005.43.3.531CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yaguchi, Michiko. 2010. The historical development of the phrase there's: An analysis of the Oxford English Dictionary data. English Studies 91. 203–24. DOI: 10.1080/00138380903355007.10.1080/00138380903355007CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhan, Meilin, and Levy, Roger. 2018. Comparing theories of speaker choice using a model of classifier production in Mandarin Chinese. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, vol. 1 (long papers), 1997–2005. DOI: 10.18653/v1/N18-1181.10.18653/v1/N18-1181.10.18653/v1/N18-1181.10.18653/v1/N18-1181CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhan, Meilin, and Levy, Roger. 2019. Availability-based production predicts speakers' real-time choices of Mandarin classifiers. Proceedings of the 41st annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci '19), 1268–87. Online: https://cogsci.mindmodeling.org/2019/papers/0231/0231.pdf.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1970. Auxiliary reduction in English. Linguistic Inquiry 1. 323–36. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4177570.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1977. On clitics. Columbus: The Ohio State University, ms. [Reproduced by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1977.].Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M., and Pullum, Geoffrey K.. 1983. Cliticization vs. inflection: English n't. Language 59. 502–13. DOI: 10.2307/413900.Google Scholar