Abstract This paper contrasts typological and diachronic evidence on argument marking with theoretical proposals made in psycholinguistic research about the ways various types of audience design strategies affect production, with a focus on ambiguity avoidance in argument roles. The aim is to find convergent evidence from psycholinguistics as well as from typological and diachronic research. This evidence suggests that argument marking in functional constructions is shaped by generic audience design effects, while cross-linguistic and diachronic support for utterance-specific audience design is very scarce. Diachronically utterance-specific audience design tends to be abandoned in favor of functionally related generic audience design strategies. The paper reconciles earlier claims about ambiguity avoidance affecting argument marking and the view of ambiguity avoidance as having no effect on argument marking. It is suggested that ambiguity avoidance is a strong pressure in argument marking. I show that a high ambiguity potential of role identification of various constructions correlates positively with the degree of non-differential argument marking; and, vice versa, differential marking is more likely in constructions that provide reliable cues for role identification.
Ilja A. Seržant (Fri,) studied this question.