Magnitude estimation and what it can do for your syntax: some wh-constraints in German

Featherston, Sam

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2004.07.003

Cited by 78 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This phenomenon is not unique to Hebrew, but has also been reported for other languages (e.g. Featherston 2005 for German). In fact, the preference for "canonical" word orders extends to other constructions such as topicalization and scrambling and has been reported for many languages (see Fanselow et al 2008 for a discussion of this phenomenon in German and Czech).…”

Section: Superiority and Intervention Effects In Multiple Questionssupporting

confidence: 73%

“…Below I discuss each factor in turn, and discuss generalizations regarding the data. Acceptability of superiority-violating vs. superiority-obeying questions: As noted by Featherston (2005) and Fanselow et al (2008), superiority-obeying questions are generally preferred over superiorityviolating ones in languages that reportedly do not have superiority effects. That is, the superiority-obeying question (10)a (repeated here as (62)a) is considered by many speakers to be more natural than the superiority-violating questions in (62)b-c (that is, the superiority-violating variants of the (62)a with and without stylistic inversion).…”

Section: More On the Privileged Status Of Wh-headed Phrasesmentioning

confidence: 96%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Wh-Fronting in a two-probe system

Kotek

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Prior work on wh-movement has distinguished among several types of wh-fronting languages that permit distinct patterns of overt and covert movement, instantiated for example by the Slavic languages, English, and German. This paper extends the cross-linguistic typology of multiple questions by arguing that Hebrew instantiates a new kind of wh-fronting language, unlike any that are discussed in the current literature. It will show that Hebrew distinguishes between two kinds of interrogative phrases: those that are headed by a wh-word (wh-headed phrases: what, who, [ DP which X], where, how ...) and those that contain a wh-word but are headed by some other element (wh-containing phrases: [ NP N of wh], [ PP P wh]). We observe the special status of wh-headed phrases when one occurs structurally lower in a question than a wh-containing phrase. In that case, the wh-headed phrase can be targeted by an Agree/Attract operation that ignores the presence of the c-commanding wh-containing phrase. The paper develops an account of the sensitivity of interrogative probing operations to the head of the interrogative phrase within Cable's (2010) Q-particle theory. It proposes that the Hebrew Q has an EPP feature which can trigger head-movement of wh to Q and that a wh-probe exists alongside the more familiar Q-probe, and shows how these two modifications to the theory can account for the intricate dataset that emerges from the paper. The emerging picture is one in which interrogative probing does not occur wholesale but rather can be sensitive to particular interrogative features on potential goals.

show abstract

Section: Superiority and Intervention Effects In Multiple Questionssupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: More On the Privileged Status Of Wh-headed Phrasesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Wh-Fronting in a two-probe system

Kotek

2014

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Linguists have consistently offered strong arguments in response to these criticisms (e.g., Phillips and Lasnik, 2003;Marantz, 2005;Culicover andJackendoff, 2010, Phillips 2010) and have reported formal experimental results, including those conducted on AMT, that corroborate many informal experimental results (Featherston, 2005;Phillips, 2009). Many judgments obtained through informal methods and presented in journals and textbooks have been experimentally replicated using diverse experimental methods and tasks, thus showing that many of the criticisms cited above are unwarranted (Munro et al 2010;Cable and Harris 2011;Sprouse 2011;Almeida 2012, 2013;Sprouse, Schütze, and Almeida 2013).…”

Section: Formal Experiments and Linguistic Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is often done by presenting a consultant with a sentence in a context or paired with a certain desired meaning and asking whether the sentence in appropriate in the given context (Chomsky, 1965;Schütze, 1996). This method has been criticized for often involving (a) relatively few participants, (b) a relatively small number of target stimuli, and (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researchers and participants (Schütze 1996;Cowart 1997;Edelman and Christiansen 2003;Featherston 2005;Ferreira 2005;Marantz 2005;Wasow and Arnold 2005;Myers 2009a,b;Sprouse 2009;Gibson and Fedorenko 2010).…”

Section: Formal Experiments and Linguistic Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A streamlined approach to online linguistic surveys

Erlewine

Kotek

2015

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

More and more researchers in linguistics use large-scale experiments to test hypotheses about the data they research, in addition to more traditional informant work. In this paper we describe a new set of free, open-source tools that allow linguists to post studies online, turktools. These tools allow for the creation of a wide range of linguistic tasks, including grammaticality surveys, sentence completion tasks, and picture-matching tasks, allowing for easily implemented largescale linguistic studies. Our tools further help streamline the design of such experiments and assist in the extraction and analysis of the resulting data. Surveys created using the tools described in this paper can be posted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, a popular crowdsourcing platform that mediates between 'Requesters' who can post surveys online and 'Workers' who complete them. This allows many linguistic surveys to be completed within hours or days and at relatively low costs. Alternatively, researchers can host these randomized experiments on their own servers using a supplied server-side component.

show abstract

Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory

Schütze

2010

WIRES Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article surveys the major kinds of empirical evidence used by linguists, with a particular focus on the relevance of the evidence to the goals of generative grammar. After a background section overviewing the objectives and assumptions of that framework, three broad kinds of data are considered in the three subsequent sections: corpus data, judgment data, and (other) experimental data. The perspective adopted is that all three have their place in the linguist's toolbox: they have relative advantages and disadvantages that often complement one another, so converging evidence of more than one kind can reasonably be sought in many instances. Points are illustrated mainly with examples from syntax, but often can be easily translated to other levels (e.g., phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics). WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 206-221 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.102 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

show abstract

Magnitude estimation and what it can do for your syntax: some wh-constraints in German

Cited by 78 publications

References 9 publications

Wh-Fronting in a two-probe system

Wh-Fronting in a two-probe system

A streamlined approach to online linguistic surveys

Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About