A Single Movement Normal Form for Minimalist Grammars

Graf, Thomas; Aksënova, Alëna; Santo, Aniello De

doi:10.1007/978-3-662-53042-9_12

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…In order to address this issue, we define a total of 1,600 complexity metrics and evaluate whether they can account for the processing contrasts with relative clauses that were originally discussed in Kobele et al (2013), Graf and Marcinek (2014), and Graf et al (2016). We also use two different analyses of relative clauses from Minimal-ist syntax (promotion and wh) to determine whether the set of empirically viable metrics is still sufficiently structure-sensitive to distinguish between the accounts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative clauses as a benchmark for Minimalist parsing

Graf

Monette

Zhang

2017

JLM

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Minimalist grammars have been used recently in a series of papers to explain well-known contrasts in human sentence processing in terms of subtle structural differences. These proposals combine a top-down parser with complexity metrics that relate parsing difficulty to memory usage. So far, though, there has been no large-scale exploration of the space of viable metrics. Building on this earlier work, we compare the ability of 1600 metrics to derive several processing effects observed with relative clauses, many of which have been proven difficult to unify. We show that among those 1600 candidates, a few metrics (and only a few) can provide a unified account of all these contrasts. This is a welcome result for two reasons: First, it provides a novel account of extensively studied psycholinguistic data. Second, it significantly limits the number of viable metrics that may be applied to other phenomena, thus reducing theoretical indeterminacy.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative clauses as a benchmark for Minimalist parsing

Graf

Monette

Zhang

2017

JLM

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“…That TP is just the empty head, the only element of G2 with 2 licensees. Graf et al (2016) show that all MG languages can be defined without moving any phrase more than once, but G2 is beautifully small and symmetric.…”

Section: Minimalist Grammarsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing

2018

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The task of taking a semantic representation of a noun and predicting the brain activity triggered by it in terms of fMRI spatial patterns was pioneered by Mitchell et al. (2008). That seminal work used word co-occurrence features to represent the meaning of the nouns. Even though the task does not impose any specific type of semantic representation, the vast majority of subsequent approaches resort to featurebased models or to semantic spaces (aka word embeddings). We address this task, with competitive results, by using instead a semantic network to encode lexical semantics, thus providing further evidence for the cognitive plausibility of this approach to model lexical meaning.

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“…The annotated derivation tree for (37) can be seen in Figure 10 (we assume that each intermediate landing site checks a different wh-feature on the mover, but one may also use a single persistent wh-feature as in Stabler 2011a or posit that successive cyclic movement is not feature-triggered at all, as in Kobele 2006 andGraf et al 2016). Once again we start out with the subject a technician scoping in Spec,TP instead of its merge position, adopting the aforementioned principle that what is relevant is the least costly parse for each interpretation.…”

Section: Case 4: Wh-movement Vs Cyclic Qrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyclic scope and processing difficulty in a Minimalist parser

Pasternak

Graf

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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A common view in the theoretical literature is that quantifier raising (QR) is a clause-bounded operation. But in a paper published in Glossa, Wurmbrand (2018) argues that (i) QR is not clause-bounded, and the apparent clause-boundedness of QR is due to the human parser’s difficulty in processing extraclausal QR; and (ii) the relative difficulty of extraclausal QR depends on the size of the embedded clause from which QR takes place. She then proposes a theory of scope processing in which parsing Logical Form (LF) movement is costly for the human parser, which in conjunction with independently motivated assumptions about A′-movement generates the desired results. In this paper, we accept Wurmbrand’s descriptive observations and proposed syntax but offer an alternative, rigorously defined metric of scope processing difficulty that makes precise quantitative predictions. Our proposal is formalized with Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997) and expands recent work by Kobele et al. (2013), among others, that uses this formalism to account for numerous processing phenomena. Our metric correctly handles Wurmbrand’s observations as well as cases that are problematic for her account, and points the way toward an explanatory theory of scope processing.

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A Single Movement Normal Form for Minimalist Grammars

Cited by 8 publications

References 13 publications

Relative clauses as a benchmark for Minimalist parsing

Relative clauses as a benchmark for Minimalist parsing

Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing

Cyclic scope and processing difficulty in a Minimalist parser

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