Randolph Quirk Fellow Workshop #1: Prof. Martina Wiltschko

When: Monday, May 19, 2025, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Where: ArtsTwo 2.17 and online, Mile End Campus

Workshop 1: How do children acquire knowledge of language use?

Click here to join online.

What do humans know when they use language?

One of the core goals of the generative enterprise (and other cognitive approaches towards language) is to explore what humans know when they know a language. To achieve this goal, generative linguists typically explore properties of individual languages, the commonalities across languages, as well as the range and limits of observed variation. What has long been ignored in this approach are aspects of language restricted to language in use. Two assumptions that prevail the generative enterprise have conspired to this status quo:

(1)     Linguistic competence is the object of investigation and is to be distinguished from linguistic performance.
(2)     The sentence is the unit of grammatical analysis.

On this view, units of language (UoLs) that appear at the periphery of sentences and which serve to regulate linguistic interaction (oh, huh, well ...) are not considered to fall within the purview of grammar. However, over the past two decades there is a growing consensus that the distribution of such UoLs can be successfully analyzed on the hypothesis that they occupy the very top of syntactic structures. If so, this has profound implications for the two assumptions above as summarized in (1') and (2'). 

(1')      UoLs that serve to regulate interaction should be considered part of linguistic competence. 
(2’)     Grammatical analysis should not be restricted to the classic notion of the sentence. 

While there are several competing proposals to model the integration of aspects of language in use into our knowledge of language, in this series of workshops I focus on one such proposal: the Interactional Spine Hypothesis (Wiltschko 2021), according to which grammatical knowledge includes not only knowledge of how to construct the propositional aspects of language (p-language) but also its interactional aspects (i-language). 

Once we acknowledge that (at least some) conditions on language use are part of our grammatical competence, new research questions emerge as well as the need for new methodologies which go beyond the exploration of sentences in isolation. During the three workshops, I explore some of these questions and methodologies.

Workshop #1 Abstract:

Assuming that i-language is part of our linguistic competence raises the question regarding its acquisition. How is i-language acquired and how is it integrated with p-language during language development? These are the questions I pursue in the first workshop. 

Based on two corpus-based case studies of the early use of huh and of backchannels, I demonstrate that interactional UoLs are among the first "words" to be acquired. This raises an interesting challenge for existing assumptions regarding language acquisition. Specifically, it is commonly assumed that syntactic structure matures in an upward fashion, i.e., that trees grow upwards (see Friedman et al. 2021 for a recent incarnation of this view). However, if i-language is associated with the very top of the tree, its early acquisition is mysterious.

In this workshop, I introduce an alternative: the inward growing spine hypothesis (Heim & Wiltschko, in print). Accordingly, syntactic acquisition proceeds in an inward fashion starting at both ends of the adult structure: categorizing structures at the bottom and the structure responsible for managing turn-taking at the top (Wiltschko's ResponseP). These structures are first linked via the layer of structure which - in adult-language - corresponds to CP. In subsequent stages, the intermediate structures responsible for grounding in interaction and for anchoring propositions are acquired. I will show that the inward growing spine hypothesis allows for a straightforward explanation of the acquisition path of huh and backchannels. Moreover, I argue that the observed patterns of acquisition support the view that i-language is part of our linguistic competence and that the sentence should not be considered the primary unit of analysis.