Alba talking at NYU

Closing the scope of a quantifier in real time.

Friday March 13, Alba Jorquera Jiménez de Aberásturi is up in the Big Apple presenting her work at the NYU Syntax Brown Bag series. In the work, which she did with alum Dave Kush in Toronto, Alba shows that pre-verbal clitic pronouns in Spanish are more sensitive to interference from a preceding quantifier that matches in gender than are post-verbal pronouns, suggesting that the scope of the quantifier has not yet been definitively represented as closed. Her abstract is below. 

How do we parse syntactic dependencies in real time? Noun phrase (NP)-pronoun coreferential dependencies have different syntactic requirements than quantifier phrase (QP)-pronoun binding dependencies. In (1), the object pronoun ‘him’ in the main clause (MC) can corefer with the referential NP ‘the boy’ in the relative clause (RC), but ‘him’ in (2) cannot be bound by the QP ‘no boy’ in the same position because the pronoun is outside of the scope of the QP.

(1)   The teachers RC[who the boy_i doesn’t respect] want to punish him_i.
(2)   The teachers RC[who no boy_i respects] want to punish him_*i/j.
 
Previous experimental work has investigated whether comprehenders respect this scope restriction during the incremental processing of illicit QP-pronoun binding dependencies such as (2). Evidence from these studies shows that readers do not posit binding relations between a QP and a pronoun outside of its scope, suggesting that the grammar immediately guides and constrains real-time parsing mechanisms. In this talk, I ask whether the parser can initially diverge from the grammar and temporarily consider illicit QP-pronoun binding dependencies. I will present work from two reading studies in Spanish which test sentences with pre-verbal (3) and post-verbal (4) object clitics (‘lo’ him).
 
(3)   Las profesoras RC[a las que ningún chicoi respeta]     lo_*i/j      quieren castigar.
        The teachers    RC[who        no boy_i           respects] him_*i/j want     to punish.
(4)   Las profesoras RC[a las que ningún chicoi respeta ] quieren castigarlo_*i/j.
        The teachers    RC[who        no boy_i           respects] want     to punish him*i/j.
 
Similar to previous research, we find that comprehenders’ behaviour aligns with the grammar when  the critical pronoun is in post-verbal position (4), such that they do not consider the ungrammatical QP binder ‘ningún chico’ (no boy) as a potential antecedent for the clitic ‘lo’ (him). In contrast, and perhaps surprisingly, we find that readers initially consider the illicit QP when the pronoun is in pre-verbal position (3). I will address our results by proposing that the mechanism responsible for closing a QP’s scope domain is not instantaneous, such that the closer a pronoun is to the locus of this update, the more likely that said update has not been completed. I will argue that this can give rise to cases where readers temporarily access an illicit QP binder as a potential antecedent for a pronoun.