Research

Sabbagh (2008) makes an empirical argument concerning the derivation of right node raising (RNR) sentences in Tagalog. He notes that all and only the syntactic constituents that can undergo typical leftward wh-movement can serve as the shared element, or target, of a RNR sentence. Therefore, he argues, a movement analysis would be the most plausible for Tagalog RNR. However, when investigated further, the parallelism does not hold. A greater variety of elements can serve as the RNR target than can be wh-moved, contrary to what Sabbagh claims. The fact that elements that cannot undergo A-bar movement can still act as RNR targets suggests that RNR in Tagalog is not derived via A-bar movement. The instances where RNR is not allowed can be explained by the interplay between morphologically realized specificity marking of Tagalog arguments and crosslinguistic information structure requirements of RNR sentences. The position immediately prior to the gaps in RNR must represent discourse-salient new information (as in Hartmann 2000, Ha 2007). The illicit RNR sentences that Sabbagh produces fail to be acceptable because the constituents in this position are marked with a ‘‘specific’’ determiner (Schachter and Otanes 1972, Kroeger 1993), which, being specific, requires a ‘‘previously established discourse referent’’ (Enc ̧ 1991:8). That is, the pregap expressions must simultaneously represent new information and refer to an established referent, a difficult feat. Discourse-initially this is not possible for obvious reasons, and it is correctly predicted that RNR sentences with pregap, specific-marked expressions are judged unacceptable. However, in particular contexts, the otherwise unacceptable sentences are judged acceptable.

This paper is an investigation of freezing properties related to subjects and objects. Starting out by giving an account of the most prominent Norwegian properties, it then turns to a comparative study between primarily English and Norwegian indirect objects. This comparative study will be shown to have important consequences for the approach to indirect objects. It will be argued that although recent studies are able to capture central aspects of indirect objects, they are inadequate when it comes to accounting for freezing properties. In the present paper, freezing effects are understood in terms of agreement properties, most notably Case agreement. It is shown that both subjects and indirect objects disallow sub-extraction in both English in Norwegian, but that whereas English does not allow the indirect object to A-bar move, Norwegian allows this A-bar movement. The paper argues that this relates to whether Case is structural or inherent. As such, this paper offers a new argument in favor of Case as a central ingredient in deriving freezing effects.

Until recently, mainstream minimalist theorizing has treated construal as a (CI) interface process rather than as a part of core grammar. Recently, a number of authors have resisted this categorization and tried to reduce binding and control relations to those established by movement, agreement, or some combination of the two. In this chapter we’ll compare and contrast two theories that give the grammar a privileged position with respect to the establishment of (at least some) binding relations. We’ll discuss variants of Hornstein’s (2001) movement-based analysis of construal and Reuland’s (2001, 2005) Agree-based theory of reflexive binding. For ease of exposition, we’ll refer to the former as Chain-Based Construal (CBC) and the latter as Agree-Based Construal (ABC)

Rightward extraposition out of a PP is ungrammatical, and yet PPs can be extraposed even when prosodically light. Why? Because Spellout is cyclic, PPs are phases, and prepositions follow their specifiers.

An account of phonological rules in terms of syntactic phases.

This paper extends Fox & Sauerland’s (1996) analysis of scope illusions and argues that what looks like inverse scope readings in clefts with indefinite NP pivots are really illusory cases of scope inversion. Instead, inverse scope comes about due to generic quantification over situations. Furthermore, the present paper adds to Fox and Sauerland by observing differences between "a" and "some" indefinites, where only the former yields illusory scope.

Systems that process natural language must cope with and resolve ambiguity. In this dissertation, a model of language processing is advocated in which multiple inputs and multiple analyses of inputs are considered concurrently and a single analysis is only a last resort. Compared to conventional models, this approach can be understood as replacing single-element inputs and outputs with weighted sets of inputs and outputs. Although processing components must deal with sets (rather than individual elements), constraints are imposed on the elements of these sets, and the representations from existing models may be reused. However, to deal efficiently with large (or infinite) sets, compact representations of sets that share structure between elements, such as weighted finite-state transducers and synchronous context-free grammars, are necessary. These representations and algorithms for manipulating them are discussed in depth in depth. To establish the effectiveness and tractability of the proposed processing model, it is applied to several problems in machine translation. Starting with spoken language translation, it is shown that translating a set of transcription hypotheses yields better translations compared to a baseline in which a single (1-best) transcription hypothesis is selected and then translated, independent of the translation model formalism used. More subtle forms of ambiguity that arise even in text-only translation (such as decisions conventionally made during system development about how to preprocess text) are then discussed, and it is shown that the ambiguity-preserving paradigm can be employed in these cases as well, again leading to improved translation quality. A model for supervised learning that learns from training data where sets (rather than single elements) of correct labels are provided for each training instance and use it to learn a model of compound word segmentation is also introduced, which is used as a preprocessing step in machine translation.

This dissertation investigates adults and children's sentence processing mechanisms, with a special focus on how multiple levels of linguistic representation are incrementally computed in real time, and how this process affects the parser's ability to later revise its early commitments. Using cross-methodological and cross-linguistic investigations of long-distance dependency processing, this dissertation demonstrates how paying explicit attention to the procedures by which linguistic representations are computed is vital to understanding both adults' real time linguistic computation and children's reanalysis mechanisms. The first part of the dissertation uses time course evidence from self-paced reading and eye tracking studies (reading and visual world) to show that long-distance dependency processing can be decomposed into a sequence of syntactic and interpretive processes. First, the reading experiments provide evidence that suggests that filler-gap dependencies are constructed before verb information is accessed. Second, visual world experiments show that, in the absence of information that would allow hearers to predict verb content in advance, interpretive processes in filler-gap dependency computation take around 600ms. These results argue for a predictive model of sentence interpretation in which syntactic representations are computed in advance of interpretive processes. The second part of the dissertation capitalizes on this procedural account of filler-gap dependency processing, and reports cross-linguistic studies on children's long-distance dependency processing. A comparison of the process of anaphor reconstruction in adults and children further suggests that verb-based thematic information is an effective revision cue for children. Finally, distributional analyses of wh-dependencies in child-directed speech are conducted to investigate how parsing constraints impact language acquisition. It is shown that the actual properties of the child parser can skew the input distribution, such that the effective distribution differs drastically from the input distribution seen from a researcher's perspective. This suggests that properties of developing perceptual mechanisms deserve more attention in language acquisition research.

This dissertation revisits subject island effects (Ross 1967, Chomsky 1973) cross-linguistically. Controlled acceptability judgment studies in German, English, Japanese and Serbian suggest that extraction out of specifiers is consistently degraded compared to extraction out of complements, indicating that the Condition on Extraction domains (CED, Huang 1982) is still empirically viable, contrary to recent claims (Stepanov 2007). As a consequence, recent treatments of the CED in terms of Multiple Spell-Out (Uriagereka 1999) are still tenable. First, a series of NP-subextraction experiments in German using 'was für'-split is discussed. The results indicate that subject island effects cannot be reduced to freezing effects (Wexler & Culicover 1981). Extraction out of in-situ subjects is degraded compared to extraction out of in-situ objects. Freezing incurs an additional cost, i.e., extraction out of moved domains is degraded compared to in-situ domains. Further results from German indicate that extraction out of in-situ unaccusative and passive subjects is en par with extraction out of objects, while extraction out of in-situ transitive and intransitive unergative subjects causes a decrease in acceptability. Additionally, extraction out of indirect objects is degraded compared to extraction out of direct objects. It is also observed that a second gap improves the acceptability of otherwise illicit 'was für'-split, a phenomenon dubbed Across-the-Board (ATB)-'was für'-split and analysed in terms of Sideward Movement (Hornstein & Nunes 2002). Furthermore, wh-extraction out of non-finite sentential arguments also shows a significant subject/object asymmetry. Experiments in English indicate that NP-subextraction yields the familiar subject/object asymmetry, while the contrast largely disappears when PPs are fronted. Further results show that ECM and passive predicates do not improve the acceptability of the extraction out of subjects. Finally, subject subextraction patterns in Japanese and Serbian are investigated. Both Long-distance scrambling and clefting out of sentential subjects in Japanese leads to a stronger degradation than out of sentential objects. PP-extraction in Serbian also shows the same subject/object asymmetry, while no such contrast is found for Left Branch Extraction.

When and why are noun phrases understood as scoping below their surface position?