Limits to attention: A cognitive theory of island phenomena

Deane, Paul

doi:10.1515/cogl.1991.2.1.1

Cited by 161 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…This is not unexpected. Pesetsky (1989) has shown that Dlinking plays a major role in ameliorating extraction out of weak islands; a similar observation is reported inter alia in Chung and McCloskey (1983);Chomsky (1986); Cinque (1990); Hegarty (1990); Deane (1991); Pollard and Sag (1994); Comorovski (1996) Brought to you by | Periodicals Section, Albert Sloman Libr. Authenticated Download Date | 7/22/15 11:00 AM (2012).…”

Section: Internal Properties Of the Extracteementioning

confidence: 56%

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Haegeman¹,

Jiménez-Fernández

Radford

2014

The Linguistic Review

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Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are inter esting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In this paper we argue that the islandhood of sub ject DPs in both English and Spanish is not categorical. The degradation associ ated with extraction from subjects must be attributed to the interplay of a range of more general constraints which are not specific to subjects. We argue that the interaction of these constraints has a cumulative effect whereby the more constraints that are violated, the higher the degree of degradation that results. We also argue that some speakers have a greater tolerance for constraint viola tions than others, which would account for widespread interspeaker judgment variability.

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Section: Internal Properties Of the Extracteementioning

confidence: 56%

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Haegeman¹,

Jiménez-Fernández

Radford

2014

The Linguistic Review

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“…5 The strength of conclusions that can be drawn from a lack of evidence has raised concerns, particularly because some island domains have been argued to themselves constitute complex processing environments, whether a dependency is present or not (e.g. Deane 1991, Kluender 2004. Therefore null findings in island processing are liable to alternative interpretations that are unrelated to the parser's interaction with the grammar.…”

Section: Islandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple dependencies and the role of the grammar in real-time comprehension

Wagers

Phillips

2009

J. Ling.

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Wh-dependencies are known to be formed rapidly in real-time comprehension. The parser posits the location of gap sites in advance of the bottom-up evidence for missing constituents, and must therefore have a means of deciding when and where to project dependencies. Previous studies have observed that the parser avoids building ungrammatical wh-dependencies, for example, by restricting the search for gap sites from island domains. This paper tests the stronger claim that constraints are not merely respected, but that grammatical knowledge actively prompts the construction of some representations in advance of the input. Three self-paced reading experiments examined patterns of wh-dependency formation in multiple-dependency constructions: obligatory across-the-board (ATB) extraction from coordinated verb phrases, and from optional parasitic gaps in post-verbal adjunct clauses. The key finding is that comprehenders immediately enforce the requirement for extraction from coordinates, and hence actively search for multiple gap sites within a coordinate VP; but they do not search for post-verbal parasitic gaps. This difference cannot be attributed to relative differences in acceptability, as comprehenders rated both of these multiple-gap constructions equally highly, nor can it be explained by general parsing incentives to develop maximal incremental interpretations of partial strings. More plausibly, the difference reflects the deployment of detailed grammatical knowledge in a parser that is motivated to satisfy structural licensing requirements in real time.

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“…Il existe une littérature fournie consacrée aux extractions hors de syntagme nominal (SN) sujet (Deane 1991, Sabel 2002, Chaves 2013 qui semble problématique dans certaines langues, comme l'anglais 2 . Il existe plusieurs études empiriques sur l'anglais et sur d'autres langues (Polinsky et al 2013, Sprouse et al 2015, mais nous n'avons pas connaissance d'études similaires réalisées sur le français.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

Les relatives endontdu français : études empiriques

Abeillé

Winckel

2016

SHS Web of Conferences

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Both corpora corroborate the work of Godard (1980) : dont is widely used as a complement on noun, extractions out of NP are not marginal, not even out of subject NP which are considered non-grammatical by some linguistic theories. The corpus studies show that this kind of extraction is widely-used in French and even concern "real subjects" of transitive verbs, which goes against the prediction made by many generative theories. In generative grammar, relative clauses (as well as any extraction) are subject to island constraints (Ross 1957). The nominal island constraint predicts that the extraction of a noun complement should be harder than the extraction of a verb complement. The subject island constraint rules out extractions out of subject NPs, which is claimed to be only acceptable when the subject NP is an underlying object (Chomsky 2008). However, in our corpora, dont-RC extractions out of NP subject are more frequent than extractions out of NP object. This observation confirms Gibson's Dependency Locality Theory (DLT), which predicts that the extraction from subject NP should have less cognitive costs than the extraction from object NP. Other observations corroborate this theory as well: for example, that dont-RC corresponding to the extraction of the complement of a verb favor pronominal or inverted subjects. Our experimental study is an online acceptability task. Its aim is to compare the judgments from native speakers related to dont-RC implying an extraction out of subject NP and object NP (the kind of subject involved in the later case has an impact of the DLT's predictions and have been tested as well).The results confirm again the predictions from the DLT: the judgments for the extraction out of subject NPs are significantly higher than for the extraction out of object NPs.

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Limits to attention: A cognitive theory of island phenomena

Cited by 161 publications

References 3 publications

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Deconstructing the Subject Condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation

Multiple dependencies and the role of the grammar in real-time comprehension

Les relatives endontdu français : études empiriques

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