Is redundancy useful in language? Agent-recipient disambiguation in English and Dutch.

peer reviewed ; robustness in language processing and learning (MacWhinney et al. 2014), both from a typological and diachronic perspective. Specifically, we assess the potential benefits or costs of redundancy in morphosyntactic marking of participant roles, comparing and testing two opposing hypotheses: On the one hand, following the most crucial tenet in usage-based linguistics that language use affects – or even determines – grammar (Bybee 2010), we assume that language is organised in a way that facilitates efficient usage (e.g. Gibson et al. 2019). On this account, redundant marking shou... Mehr ...