Frequency effects in Subject Islands

Chaves, Rui P.; Dery, Jeruen E.

doi:10.1017/s0022226718000294

Cited by 27 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 108 publications

(222 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In addition, we observed that extractions from subjects that leave a preposition stranded are much worse than corresponding preposition stranded extractions from objects. This result replicates previous results showing that extractions from objects are rated better than extractions from subjects (Polinsky et al, 2013;Sprouse et al, 2016, Chaves & Dery, 2019.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Here we sought to replicate others' earlier results showing that extractions from objects are rated better than extractions from subjects (Polinsky et al, 2013;Sprouse et al, 2016;Chaves & Dery, 2019) with preposition stranding.…”

Section: Experiments 2: English Relative Clauses Involving Extraction...mentioning

confidence: 80%

“…by Ross, 1967, andChomsky, 2008, see Section 1) but these examples have not been properly tested experimentally. Acceptable examples can be found in corpora as in ( 14) (a,b from Santorini, 2007;Huddleston & Pullum, 2002;Chaves and Dery, 2019) (Chaves & Dery, 2019, 481) d. A coalition of US groups including USA Today surveyed 850 women in the film industry of whom [the vast majority __] reported some form of sexual misconduct (The Guardian, 21, February, 2018) e. Doctors diagnosed a rare brain disease for which [the cure __] was radical: the left hemisphere of his brain would have to be surgically removed. (www.thirteen.org) One important factor seems to be that extracting the whole PP complement of a noun is not the same as extracting the NP complement of a preposition.…”

Section: Previous Experiments Evaluating the Acceptability Of Extract...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Under this view, the constraints amount to accumulating cognitive cost associated with processing complex but otherwise grammatical sentences (Kluender & Kutas, 1993;Hofmeister & Sag, 2010; but see Sprouse et al, 2012). This kind of approach attempts to explain why there are counter-examples like (3a), (4c) or (5) (Kluender, 2004;Kravtchenko et al, 2009;Chaves, 2013;Chaves & Dery, 2019). 2 (5) a.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The cultural origins of symbolic number.

O’Shaughnessy¹,

Gibson²,

Piantadosi³

2022

Psychological Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In order to explain the unacceptability of certain long-distance dependencies --termed syntactic islands by Ross (1967) --syntacticians proposed constraints on long-distance dependencies which are universal and purely syntactic and thus not dependent on the meaning of the construction (Chomsky 1977(Chomsky , 2006. This predicts that these constraints should hold across constructions and languages. In this paper, we investigate the "subject island" constraint across constructions in English and French, a constraint that blocks extraction out of subjects. In particular, we compare extraction out of nominal subjects with extraction out of nominal objects, in relative clauses and wh-questions, using similar materials across constructions and languages. Contrary to the syntactic accounts, we find that unacceptable extractions from subjects involve (a) extraction in wh-questions (in both languages); or (b) preposition stranding (in English). But the extraction of a whole prepositional phrase from subjects in a relative clause, in both languages, is as good or better than a similar extraction from objects. Following Erteschik-Shir (1973) and Kuno (1987) among others, we propose a theory that takes into account the discourse status of the extracted element in the construction at hand: the extracted element is a focus (corresponding to new information) in wh-questions, but not in relative clauses. The focus status conflicts with the non-focal status of a subject (usually given or discourse-old). These results suggest that most previous discussions of islands may rely on the wrong premise that all extraction types behave alike. Once different extraction types are recognized as different constructions (

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Experiments 2: English Relative Clauses Involving Extraction...mentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Previous Experiments Evaluating the Acceptability Of Extract...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The cultural origins of symbolic number.

O’Shaughnessy¹,

Gibson²,

Piantadosi³

2022

Psychological Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Which property makes sentences prone to satiation remains unclear. Explanations in the literature range from structural properties within generative syntax (Snyder [ 5 ]: 579 classical “subjacency” effects in the sense of Chomsky [ 6 ]) to sentence processing difficulty (as in, e.g., Chaves & Dery [ 7 , 8 ]) to issues of comprehension fluency (e.g., Zervakis & Mazuka [ 9 ]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Middle ratings rise regardless of grammatical construction: Testing syntactic variability in a repeated exposure paradigm

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People perceive sentences more favourably after hearing or reading them many times. A prominent approach in linguistic theory argues that these types of exposure effects (satiation effects) show direct evidence of a generative approach to linguistic knowledge: only some sentences improve under repeated exposure, and which sentences do improve can be predicted by a model of linguistic competence that yields natural syntactic classes. However, replications of the original findings have been inconsistent, and it remains unclear whether satiation effects can be reliably induced in an experimental setting at all. Here we report four findings regarding satiation effects in wh-questions across German and English. First, the effects pertain to zone of well-formedness rather than syntactic class: all intermediate ratings, including calibrated fillers, increase at the beginning of the experimental session regardless of syntactic construction. Second, though there is satiation, ratings asymptote below maximum acceptability. Third, these effects are consistent across judgments of superiority effects in English and German. Fourth, wh-questions appear to show similar profiles in English and German, despite these languages being traditionally considered to differ strongly in whether they show effects on movement: violations of the superiority condition can be modulated to a similar degree in both languages by manipulating subject-object initiality and animacy congruency of the wh-phrase. We improve on classic satiation methods by distinguishing between two crucial tests, namely whether exposure selectively targets certain grammatical constructions or whether there is a general repeated exposure effect. We conclude that exposure effects can be reliably induced in rating experiments but exposure does not appear to selectively target certain grammatical constructions. Instead, they appear to be a phenomenon of intermediate gradient judgments.

show abstract

A compositional mechanism for pairwise predication in the Korean Left-Node Raising construction

Lee

2021

J East Asian Linguist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Frequency effects in Subject Islands

Cited by 27 publications

References 108 publications

The cultural origins of symbolic number.

The cultural origins of symbolic number.

Middle ratings rise regardless of grammatical construction: Testing syntactic variability in a repeated exposure paradigm

A compositional mechanism for pairwise predication in the Korean Left-Node Raising construction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About