Prosodic Influence on Syntactic Judgements

Abstract

We argue for the importance of controlling prosody in soliciting syntactic judgments. Through the analyses of a variety of complex Wh-constructions in Japanese, we first attempt to reveal that a construction which requires a non-default prosody is vulnerable to misjudgments of syntactic wellformedness when it is presented to the subjects in writing. We then report on our pilot experiments on the comparison of grammaticality judgments of written and spoken sentences in both English and Japanese, which supports our claim.

Appeals to prosody in Japanese Wh-interrogatives—Speakers’ versus listeners’ strategies

“…(ii) 'What 1 is it that Naoya still remembers [whether Mari drank it 1 at the bar]?' Kitagawa and Fodor (2006) support this analysis with the results of their experiment investigating subjects' incremental parsing, in which sentences like (11), with Global FPd assigned, were accepted more often in listening than in silent reading. Note that the implicit Local FPd here would force the Wh-phrase na'ni 'what' to be associated with the declarative COMP -to 'that' in the subordinate clause and induce ungrammaticality, as was discussed for similar sentences in (7) and (8) above.…”

“…If, on the contrary, this sentence is accompanied by Local FPd (that is, if the matrix item i'mademo 'even now' in these sentences does not undergo post-focal reduction and remains fully uncompressed), it would force the Wh-phrase to be associated with the declarative complementizer -to (-COMP That ) and the sentences become awkward and uninterpretable. This observation has been made by Deguchi and Kitagawa (2002:83) and, as discussed in Section 2.2.1 below, supported experimentally by Kitagawa and Fodor (2006). Thus, these researchers were led to conclude that it is a mistake to regard FPd as an exceptional intonational pattern that is appealed to only in order to override the Subjacency condition in cases like (3) and (6a).…”

“…Markedness in pragmatics, processing, and prosody Kitagawa and Fodor (2003), Kitagawa and Fodor (2006) and Kitagawa (2005) (henceforth collectively referred to as K&F) attempt to provide an answer to this question, pointing out that the extra-grammatical factors listed in (9) below create a strong bias toward the subordinate Wh-scope interpretation in scopally-ambiguous sentences, sometimes even breaking the scope-prosody correlation encoded in the grammar.…”

Animacy effects on crossing wh-movement in German

“…Schütze (1996) exemplifies this difficulty in various domains, and argues that, in principle, it can be coped with by controlled acceptability rating experiments. A recent example with far-reaching theoretical consequences involves the discussion of wh-island constraints for in situ wh-phases in Japanese (Kitagawa and Fodor 2006;Ishihara 2005), where it could be shown that alleged subjacency effects on in situ wh-phrases do not exist. So-called "third-wh-effects" in English multiple questions also disappear under closer inspection (Clifton et al 2006;Fedorenko and Gibson 2010).…”

Linguística experimental: aferindo o curso temporal e a profundidade do processamento

“…Desde há muito, no entanto, diversos autores vêm questionando a confiabilidade dos dados informais de julgamento (cf. HILL, 1961;LABOV, 1996;SCHÜTZE, 1996;COWART, 1997;KITAGAWA;FODOR, 2006;FEATHERSTON, 2007;PHILLIPS, 2009;GIBSON;FEDORENKO, 2010, entre muitos trabalhos), apontando a sua instabilidade e consequente não confiabilidade, pelo menos como ponto de chegada das análises.…”