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Knowledge of grammar, knowledge of usage: Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Susanne Gahl  and
Susan M. Garnsey
Susanne Gahl*
Affiliation:
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Susan M. Garnsey*
Affiliation:
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801 [gahl@iCsi.berkeley.edu] [sgarnsey@psych.uiuc.edu]
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 N. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61801 [gahl@iCsi.berkeley.edu] [sgarnsey@psych.uiuc.edu]
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Abstract

Frequent words tend to shorten (see e.g. Schuchardt 1885, Hooper 1976), as do words that have a high probability of occurrence given a neighboring word (Jurafsky et al. 2001). This tendency has been cited in support of the claim that probabilities are an inherent part of grammar, and of syntax in particular. There is widespread consensus, however, that the syntax of natural languages cannot be captured in terms of item-to-item transitions (Chomsky 1957). Therefore, unless one considers probabilities of syntactic structures, rather than particular combinations of neighboring words, pronunciation variation cannot be said to reflect probabilistic effects in syntax. In this article, we report a case of pronunciation variation that reflects contextual probabilities of syntactic structures. The relevant probabilities are based on the probability of a given syntactic-structure, given a particular verb. We show that these probabilities affect American English /t,d/-deletion, as well as the durations of words and phrases. Our results are consistent with the notion that knowledge of grammar includes knowledge of probabilities of syntactic structures, and that this knowledge affects language production.*

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 80 , Issue 4 , December 2004 , pp. 748 - 775
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

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