Naomi Peck - The projectability of ditropism in discourse

Descriptions of grammatical structure often rely on native speaker intuition, elicitation, and written sources. Linguistic theory is then applied to these data to derive a hypothesis about the units of the linguistic system. However, the large majority of these studies that rely on this kind of decontextualised data cannot accurately capture the systematic use of language on-line – that is, language as it is spoken or signed. To address the question of what units are relevant in spoken language, I look at the projectability of constructions. Here, projectability does not refer to the capability of an element to project a tree structure upwards, like in classic generativism, but rather the capability of speakers to probabilistically project an upcoming structure forward in time based on their experience with the language. In this talk, I will discuss how we can investigate projectability cross-linguistically with the example of ditropic constructions, where prosodically-separated left-edge elements in a construction project the rest of the construction to come.