Cognitive constraints and island effects

Hofmeister, Philip; Sag, Ivan A.

doi:10.1353/lan.0.0223

Cited by 274 publications

(291 citation statements)

References 91 publications

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“…This result suggests that the amelioration is specific to Dlinking, and not a general effect of featural specification. A complete characterization of the Dlinking effect under the factorial design is beyond the scope of this article; however, one potentially interesting consequence of the pattern of results obtained here is that this D-linking effect may be specific to island-violating-sentences and not a general effect of featural specification on sentence processing (as has been claimed in the literature, e.g., Hofmeister and Sag 2010). We leave a detailed investigation of this effect to future research.…”

Section: Wh-dependencies With Complex Wh-phrases and Island Effectssupporting

confidence: 56%

Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian

Sprouse

Caponigro²,

Greco³

et al. 2015

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

132

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Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian AcknowledgmentsThis work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants BCS-0843896 and BSC-1347115 to JS. We would like to thank Michela Marchesi for assistance collecting data for the Italian WH-dependencies experiment. We would like to thank Jeremy Hartman, Norbert Hornstein, Luigi Rizzi, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. We would also like to thank audiences at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Illinois Chicago for helpful comments at various stages of the development of this study. All errors remain our own.1 Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian AbstractThe goal of this article is to explore the utility of experimental syntax techniques in the investigation of syntactic variation. To that end, we applied the factorial definition of island effects made available by experimental syntax (e.g., ) to four island types (wh/whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct), two dependency types (wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies) and two languages (English and Italian). The results of 8 primary experiments suggest that there is indeed variation across dependency types, suggesting that wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies cannot be identical at every level of analysis; however, the pattern of variation observed in these experiments is not exactly the pattern of variation previously reported in the literature (e.g., Rizzi 1982). We review six major syntactic approaches to the analysis island effects (Subjacency, CED, Barriers, Relativized Minimality, Structure-building, and Phases) and discuss the implications of these results for these analyses. We also present 4 supplemental experiments testing complex wh-phrases (also called D-linked or lexically restricted wh-phrases) for all four island types using the factorial design in order to tease apart the contribution of dependency type from featural specification. The results of the supplemental experiments confirm that dependency type is the major source of variation, not featural specification, while providing a concrete quantification of what exactly the effect of complex wh-phrases on island effects is.

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Section: Wh-dependencies With Complex Wh-phrases and Island Effectssupporting

confidence: 56%

Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian

Sprouse

Caponigro²,

Greco³

et al. 2015

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

132

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Hofmeister and Sag 2010;Phillips 2012). Indeed, as we noted in the Introduction, we think the goal of explaining the acceptability pattern in terms of general wellformedness biases is a worthwhile one, because the theory would be less stipulative and more explanatory.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

The division of labor in explanations of verb phrase ellipsis

Kim

Runner

2017

Linguist and Philos

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In this paper, we will argue that, of the various grammatical and discourse constraints that affect acceptability in verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), only the structural parallelism constraint is unique to VPE. We outline (previously noted) systematic problems that arise for classical structural accounts of VPE resolution, and discuss efforts in recent research on VPE to reduce explanations of acceptability in VPE to general well-formedness constraints at the level of information structure (e. In two magnitude estimation experiments, we show that-in line with Kehler's predictions-degradation due to structural mismatch is modulated by coherence relation. On the other hand, we consistently find residual structural mismatch effects, suggesting that the interpretation of VPE is sensitive to structural features of the VPE antecedent. We propose that a structural constraint licenses VPE, but that sentences violating this constraint can nevertheless be interpreted. The variability in acceptability is accounted for not by additional constraints on VPE in the grammar, but by the numerous general biases that affect sentence and discourse well-formedness, such as information structural constraints (as proposed by Kertz 2013), discourse coherence relations (Kehler 2000), sensitivity to Question Under Discussion structure (e.g. Ginzburg and Sag in English , and thematic role bias at the lexical level (e.g. McRae et al. in J Mem Lang 38:283-312, 1998). We test the prediction that thematic role bias (Experiment 3) and QUD structure (Experiment 4) will influence both elliptical and non-elliptical sentences alike, while structural mismatch continues to degrade elliptical sentences alone. Our proposal differs from existing proposals in cutting the explanatory pie in a different way with respect to how variations in acceptability are accounted for. We suggest that degradation can result from at least two distinct and separable sources: violating construction-specific grammatical constraints, or from complexity differences in interpretation related to very general discourse level information.

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“…Contrary to some of the literature cited, note that we do not limit the effect of (47) to extraction out of islands, since Hofmeister (2007 and Hofmeister and Sag (2010) produce experimental evidence that extraction out of nonislands is also ameliorated by Dlinking.…”

Section: Internal Properties Of the Extracteementioning

confidence: 88%

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Haegeman¹,

Jiménez-Fernández

Radford

2014

The Linguistic Review

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Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are inter esting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In this paper we argue that the islandhood of sub ject DPs in both English and Spanish is not categorical. The degradation associ ated with extraction from subjects must be attributed to the interplay of a range of more general constraints which are not specific to subjects. We argue that the interaction of these constraints has a cumulative effect whereby the more constraints that are violated, the higher the degree of degradation that results. We also argue that some speakers have a greater tolerance for constraint viola tions than others, which would account for widespread interspeaker judgment variability.

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Cognitive constraints and island effects

Cited by 274 publications

References 91 publications

Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian

Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian

The division of labor in explanations of verb phrase ellipsis

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

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