Research

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.

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

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.

The Movement Theory of Control (MTC) makes one major claim: that control relations in sentences like 'John wants to leave' are grammatically mediated by movement. This goes against the traditional view that such sentences involve not movement, but binding, and analogizes control to raising, albeit with one important distinction: whereas the target of movement in control structures is a theta position, in raising it is a non-theta position; however the grammatical procedures underlying the two constructions are the same. This book presents the main arguments for MTC and shows it to have many theoretical advantages, the biggest being that it reduces the kinds of grammatical operations that the grammar allows, an important advantage in a minimalist setting. It also addresses the main arguments against MTC, using examples from control shift, adjunct control, and the control structure of 'promise', showing MTC to be conceptually, theoretically, and empirically superior to other approaches.

This paper explores the role of learning in generative grammar, highlighting interactions between distributional patterns in the environment and the innate structure of the language faculty. Reviewing three case studies, it is shown how learners use their language faculties to leverage the environment, making inferences from distributions to grammars that would not be licensed in the absence of a richly structured hypothesis space.

This article is concerned with how to characterize and constrain the typology of reduplication and affixation, given Raimy’s (1999 et seq.) precedence-based theory of phonological representations as directed graphs. First, we establish a typology of attested reduplication and infixation anchor points based on an empirical survey. We then extend the SEARCH and COPY algorithms proposed by Mailhot & Reiss (2007) for long-distance assimilation (harmony) processes to the morphological domain, proposing modifications to reconcile this formalism with Raimy’s. Finally, we argue for an amended version of a proposal by Idsardi & Shorey (2007) regarding the process by which ‘looped’ representations created during the course of morphological concatenation are linearized.