We present an experimental investigation of the role of resumptive pronouns. We investigate object extraction in WH-questions for a range of syntactic configurations (nonislands, weak islands, strong islands) and for multiple levels of embedding (single, double, and triple). In order to establish the crosslinguistic properties of resumption, parallel experiments were conducted in three languages, viz. English, Greek, and German. Three main experimental results are reported. First, resumption does not remedy island violations: resumptive pronominals are at most as acceptable as gaps, but not more acceptable. This result disconfirms claims in the literature that resumptives can 'save' island violations. Second, embedding reduces acceptability even in extraction out of nonislands and declaratives, structures standardly assumed to be fully grammatical. Third, nonislands and weak islands pattern together and contrast with strong islands in terms of the effect of resumption and embedding. Our experimental findings show a remarkable consistency across the three languages we investigate; crosslinguistic variation appears confined to quantitative differences in crosslinguistically identical principles. We argue that these experimental results can be explained by the interaction of grammatical principles with resource limitations of the human parser. In particular, extraction from nonislands and weak islands imposes increased demands on the computational resources of the parser. We extend Gibson's (1998) syntactic prediction locality theory in order to formalize this intuition and account for the processing complexity of A-bar dependencies.*

In this paper, we investigate the interaction of phonological and syntactic constraints on the realization of Information Structure in Greek, a free word order language. We use magnitude estimation as our experimental paradigm, which allows us to quantify the influence of a given linguistic constraint on the acceptability of a sentence. We present results from two experiments. In the first experiment, we focus on the interaction of word order and context. In the second experiment, we investigate the additional effect of accent placement and clitic doubling. The results show that word order, in contrast to standard assumptions in the theoretical literature, plays only a secondary role in marking the Information Structure of a sentence. Order preferences are relatively weak and can be overridden by constraints on accent placement and clitic doubling. Our experiments also demonstrate that a null context shows the same preference pattern as an all focus context, indicating that 'default' word order and accent placement (in the absence of context) can be explained in terms of Information Structure. In the theoretical part of this paper, we formalize the interaction of syntactic and phonological constraints on Information Structure. We argue that this interaction is best captured using a notion of grammatical competition, such as the one developed by Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993. In particular, we exploit the optimality theoretic concept of constraint ranking to account for the fact that some constraint violations are more serious than others. We extend standard Optimality Theory to obtain a grammar model that predicts not only the optimal (i.e., grammatical) realization of a given input, but also makes predictions about the relative grammaticality of suboptimal structures. This allows us to derive a constraint hierarchy that accounts for the interaction of phonological and syntactic constraints on Information Structure and models the acceptability patterns found in the experimental data.PHONOLOGY COMPETES WITH SYNTAX 2

Large‐scale learner corpora collected from online language learning platforms, such as the EF‐Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT), provide opportunities to analyze learner data at an unprecedented scale. However, interpreting the learner language in such corpora requires a precise understanding of tasks: How does the prompt and input of a task and its functional requirements influence task‐based linguistic performance? This question is vital for making large‐scale task‐based corpora fruitful for second language acquisition research. We explore the issue through an analysis of selected tasks in EFCAMDAT and the complexity and accuracy of the language they elicit.

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This paper focuses on the Information Packaging notion of linkhood and provides a structural definition of this notion for Greek. We show that a combination of structural resources – syntactic (left dislocation), morphological (clitic duplication) and phonological (absence of nuclear accent) – are simultaneously exploited to realize linkhood in Greek, a generalization that can be captured in a constraint-based grammar such as HPSG, which permits the expression of interface constraints. We assume Vallduví's (1992) approach to Information Packaging, and Engdahl & Vallduví's (1996) implementation of the latter in HPSG, but deviate from Vallduví's work in adopting Hendriks & Dekker's (1996) revised definition of linkhood that relies on non-monotone anaphora. From an empirical point of view, our approach directly accounts for the invariable association of Clitic Left Dislocated NPs with wide scope readings, as well as a number of systematic differences in felicity conditions between Clitic Left Dislocation and other apparently related phenomena (Topicalization and Clitic Doubling). From a theoretical perspective, our analysis departs from syntax-based notions of topichood or discourse-linking and supports a definition that unifies linkhood with other anaphora phenomena. As such, it arguably overcomes previously noted problems for Vallduví's treatment of links as the current-locus-of-update in a Heim-style file-card system.