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Zoe Ovans with Brian and Akira in JML

April 23, 2019 Linguistics

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Now in the Journal of Memory and Language, "Rebels without a clause: Processing reflexives in fronted wh-predicates, from past and present Terps Akira Omaki, Zoe Ovans and Brian Dillon, as well as Harvard student Anthony Yacovone.

Now in the Journal of Memory and Language, "Rebels without a clause: Processing reflexives in fronted wh-predicates, from past and present Terps Akira Omaki, Zoe Ovans and Brian Dillon, as well as Harvard student Anthony Yacovone. The paper concerns sentences with cataphoric reflexives inside a fronted wh-phrase, as in "The chef that Crawley hired knew how annoyed with himself the butler would be," and asks whether we initially engage in an anaphoric search for a binder, wrongly with respect to the final interpretation. Based on two eye-tracking studies, it finds that we do, and proposes in response "that structural guidance for reflexive resolution occurs only when the necessary configurational syntactic information is available when the reflexive is encountered."

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Rebels without a clause: Processing reflexives in fronted wh-predicates

In two eye-tracking experiments, Akira Omaki and Brian Dillon find that readers initially interpret a cataphoric reflexive anaphorically, and tend to associate the reflexive with a recently preceding antecedent.