Current Prepublications

Sarah Roberts and Joan Bresnan. 2007. "Retained Inflectional Morphology in Pidgins: A Typological Study". Stanford: Stanford University Department of Linguistics ms. Pdf. 25 pp.

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Scott Grimm, Uriel Cohen Priva, Sander Lestrade, Gorkem Ozbek, Tyler Schnoebelen, Susannah Kirby, Misha Becker, Vivienne Fong, and Joan Bresnan. 2007. "A Statistical Model of Grammatical Choices in Childrens' Productions of Dative Sentences". Paper presented at FAVS 2007, York, UK, May 10-12, 2007. Pdf. 17 pp.

Joan Bresnan and Tatiana Nikitina. 2007. "The Gradience of the Dative Alternation." To appear in Reality Exploration and Discovery: Pattern Interaction in Language and Life, edited by Linda Uyechi and Lian Hee Wee. Stanford: CSLI Publications; Pdf. 21pp. A shortened, substantially revised version of Bresnan and Nikitina 2003.

Joan Bresnan. 2006. "Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic? Experiments with the English dative alternation." Invited paper to appear in the proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence, Tuebingen, 2-4 February 2006, Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base.. Series: Studies in Generative Grammar, edited by Sam Featherston and Wolfgang Sternefeld. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Pdf. 21pp. (A4 paper size)

Joan Bresnan, Ashwini Deo, and Devyani Sharma. 2007. "Typology in Variation: A Probabilistic Approach to be andn't in the Survey of English Dialects". English Language and Linguistics 11.2, 301-346. 49 pages. Pdf. Replaces Bresnan and Deo 2001.

Joan Bresnan and John Mugane. 2006. "Agentive Nominalizations in Gĩkũyũ and the Theory of Mixed Categories". In Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, Miriam Butt, Mary Dalrymple, and Tracy Holloway King (eds), CSLI Publications, Stanford, California, 2006, pp. 201-234. 39 pp. Pdf.

Joan Bresnan and Jennifer Hay. 2006. "Gradient Grammar: An Effect of Animacy on the Syntax of give in New Zealand and American English" . To appear in Lingua. Special Issue on Animacy. 26 pp. (revised and corrected, January 2007) Pdf.

Jennifer Hay and Joan Bresnan. 2006. "Spoken Syntax: The Phonetics of giving a hand in New Zealand English". The Linguistic Review 23: Special Issue on Exemplar-Based Models in Linguistics, 321-349.. 41 pp. Pdf.
Joan Bresnan. 2007. "A Few Lessons from Typology". Linguistic Typology 11(1), to appear. [Comments from the LSA Workshop: Typology in American Linguistics. An Appraisal of the Field. LSA 79th Annual Meeting, Oakland, January 9, 2005.] Final revision, December 2006. 13 pages. Pdf.
Joan Bresnan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina, and Harald Baayen. 2007. "Predicting the Dative Alternation." In Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation, ed. by G. Boume, I. Kraemer, and J. Zwarts. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science, pp. 69--94. 33 pages. Pdf.

Joan Bresnan and Tatiana Nikitina. 2003. "On the Gradience of the Dative Alternation". Draft of May 7, 2003. 39 pages. Pdf.
Joan Bresnan and Judith Aissen. 2002. "Optimality and Functionality: Objections and Refutations". Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20(1): 81 - 95. 18 pages. Postscript, pdf.
Joan Bresnan, Shipra Dingare, and Christopher D. Manning. 2001. "Soft Constraints Mirror Hard Constraints: Voice and Person in English and Lummi". Proceedings of the LFG '01 Conference. CSLI Publications. 20 pages. Postscript. Pdf.

Joan Bresnan and Ashwini Deo. 2001. "Grammatical Constraints on Variation: `Be' in the Survey of English Dialects and (Stochastic) Optimality Theory". Draft of May 7, 2001 (minor corrections over April 25 version). 45 pages. Postscript, pdf.

Joan Bresnan. 2000. "Pidgin Genesis and Optimality Theory". In Processes of Language Contact: Case Studies from Australia and the Pacific, edited by Jeff Siegel. Montreal: Les Editions Fides, 145--173. 34 pages. Postscript; pdf. This is a revision of my LFG98 paper.

Joan Bresnan. 2002. "The Lexicon in Optimality Theory." In The Lexical Basis of Syntactic Processing: Formal,Computational and Experimental Issues, edited by Suzanne Stevenson and Paola Merlo, pp. 39 - 58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 22 pages (postscript; also available in pdf)

Joan Bresnan. 2001. "The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun". In Optimality-theoretic Syntax, edited by Geraldine Legendre, Jane Grimshaw, and Sten Vikner, 113 - 142. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 37 pages (postscript; also available in pdf).

Joan Bresnan. 2001. "Explaining Morphosyntactic Competition." In Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory, ed. by Mark Baltin and Chris Collins, 11--44. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Final revision, February 18, 1999. 49 pages (postscript; also available in pdf). Available on the Rutgers Optimality Archive: (ROA-299-0299).

Joan Bresnan. 1998. "Markedness and Morphosyntactic Variation in Pronominal Systems". Handout for the Workshop Is Syntax Different? Common cognitive structures for syntax and phonology in Optimality Theory, December 12-13, 1998, Center for the Study of Language and Information. 16 pages (postscript).
Joan Bresnan. 1998. "Pidgin Genesis in Optimality Theory". Presented at the LFG98 Conference, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, June 30, 1998. 18 pages (postscript). Final revision of October 24, 1998. This paper can also be viewed on-line in html. Please go to CSLI Publications and look for their on-line proceedings, if you have trouble finding this link; they change their URLs without warning.

Joan Bresnan. 2000. "Optimal Syntax." In Optimality Theory: Phonology, Syntax and Acquisition, edited by Joost Dekkers, Frank van der Leeuw and Jeroen van de Weijer, 334--385. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Revised March 22, 1998. 65 pages (postscript); also available in pdf.

Joan Bresnan. 1997. "Mixed Categories as Head Sharing Constructions." Proceedings of the LFG97 Conference, University of California, San Diego, edited by Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King. On-line, Stanford University: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/LFG2/lfg97.html. 17 pages (postscript).

Rachel Nordlinger and Joan Bresnan. 1996. "Non-configurational tense in Wambaya." In Proceedings of the First LFG Conference, Rank Xerox Research Center, Grenoble, France, August 26-28, 1996, edited by Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King. On-line, Stanford University: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/publications/LFG/lfg1.html.15 pages (postscript).

Joan Bresnan. 1996. "Lexicality and Argument Structure." Invited paper given at the Paris Syntax and Semantics Conference, October 12-14, 1995. Corrected version: 12:57 p.m. April 15, 1996. 27 pages (postscript). Pdf version.

Joan Bresnan. 1998. "Morphology Competes with Syntax: Explaining Typological Variation in Weak Crossover Effects." In Is the Best Good Enough? Optimality and Competition in Syntax, edited by Pilar Barbosa, Danny Fox, Paul Hagstrom, Martha McGinnis, and David Pesetsky, 59--92. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press and MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. Revised version, March 18, 1996. About 40 pages (postscript). [Some tree artwork missing.]