The project entitled 'Complexity in complementation: understanding long-term change in verb complementation in terms of inter- and intra-individual variation' will start 1 October 2021. Below you'll find the abstract of the project.
The main objective of this proposal is to establish the impact of interindividual
differences in cognitive representations on long-term
population-level language change. In examining how the individual
and community levels interact, the project seeks to contribute to a
theory of language as a complex adaptive system. This theory views
language as a self-organizing network which at the macro-level
shows properties that are not recurrent at the individual level and yet
emerge out of complex behaviour at that level. A more specific goal is
to chart, and explain, the range of variation in the English
complementation system by studying variation between patterns
such as ‘I remember that a detective came in’ and ‘I remember a
detective coming in’. While a certain amount of variation can
probably be accounted for by a desire of varying itself, it has been
shown that the choice between complement variants is influenced by
factors such as animacy (human or abstract) or clause length. At the
same time existing studies have experienced difficulties with robustly
accounting for the variation by means of population-level (social)
variables only. When social clues are insufficient to determine
usage, cognitive mechanisms may come into play that are different
between individuals and therefore cannot easily be averaged over.
This project seeks to advance our insight in the functionality of
abstract grammatical variation of this kind by putting individual-level
analysis more central.
(The full project outline is available upon request. Please send an email to peter.petre@uantwerpen.be.)