Subextraction in Japanese and subject-object symmetry

Omaki, Akira; Fukuda, Shin; Nakao, Chizuru; Polinsky, Maria

doi:10.1007/s11049-019-09449-8

Cited by 26 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…However, there is a problem that the length of the scrambled phrases differed between the D-link ("sono NP-o") and non-D-link ("NP-o") conditions. According to corpus studies and acceptability judgement studies, long objects tent to be placed before short subjects, known as the long-before-short preference (Dryer 1980;Hawkins 1994;Yamashita & Chang 2001;Yamashita 2002;Omaki et al 2019). This leaves the possibility that the sentences with demonstratives received the significantly higher mean acceptability judgments because they are more compatible with the preference.…”

Section: Remaining Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the nature of the discourse effect on extraction in Japanese

Yano

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The present study tested whether the D-linked object moves from its thematic position over the subject or it originates where it appears in non-canonical sentences in Japanese. To this aim, we conducted acceptability judgment experiments that employed island effects as a diagnosis of movement and assessed whether the D-linking status of an extracted object of non-canonical OSV sentences escaped island effects. The results revealed that D-linking did not improve an acceptability of island violations, and therefore, a D-linked object of OSV does have a status of a moved constituent. The present result contributes to an understanding of a relationship between syntactic representation and processing of filler-gap dependencies. According to recent event-related brain potential (ERP) studies, non-canonical sentences with a filler-gap dependency elicits a P600 effect when there is no felicitous context, but they do not reveal any effect when the filler is discourse-old information. The present result is inconsistent with the interpretation that the D-linked filler does not have a status of a moved constituent, thereby resulting in no filler-gap dependency formation in Japanese sentence comprehension. Instead, the present result is consistent with the view that the P600 effect is not a neural cost of the reconstruction but is elicited by other cognitive processes, such as the resolution of the unsatisfied presupposition encoded by scrambling.

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Section: Remaining Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the nature of the discourse effect on extraction in Japanese

Yano

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…In addition to the simple presence of a wh-dependency, the length of the dependency also has an effect on acceptability, with greater distance (in terms of syntactic structure) resulting in a larger degradation. This was 3 Hofmeister, Culicover, and Winkler (2015) provide another very clear example of how the simple presence of a whdependency results in significant degradation, as do Omaki et al (2020) with regard to the presence of a scrambling dependency in Japanese. See also Namboodiripad (2017).…”

Section: Length Of Dependencymentioning

confidence: 97%

Sentence Acceptability Experiments: What, How, and Why

Goodall

2021

The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax

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Sentence acceptability experiments have become increasingly common since Cowart (1997) first presented a detailed method for carrying them out, but there is still relatively little clarity among syntacticians about what goes into a well-designed experiment, how to perform one and interpret the results, and why one might want to do this in the first place. This chapter addresses these concerns, by providing recommendations and perspective on how experimental approaches to acceptability can be understood and put to use. Section 1.1 discusses the notion of acceptability in general and the role that it has played in linguistic research. Section 1.2 enters into the details of experimental design, giving an overview of the best practices in acceptability experiments that have emerged from the last two decades of research. Section 1.3 explores the variety of factors, both grammatical and extra-grammatical, that acceptability experiments seem to be able to detect, while Section 1.4 addresses the question of why one might undertake the effort of conducting acceptability experiments. AcceptabilityAny description of a language inevitably includes a description of what is possible, e.g., a listing of the phonemes, the allowable syllable structures, the preferred word order, etc. These are essentially descriptions of what is "acceptable" in the language, and such descriptions form the core of grammatical research in all traditions. By characterizing what is acceptable, such descriptions also make implicit claims about what is not acceptable. More explicit claims of unacceptability were occasionally included I am grateful to the members of the Experimental Syntax Lab at UC San Diego and to research assistants Chengrui Zheng and Noah Hermansen for their valuable comments, discussion, and assistance in the preparation of this chapter. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.

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“…This asymmetry in island sensitivity between in-situ wh-DPs and wh-adverbs mentioned above has been established mostly based on informal judgments by syntacticians. However, recent experimental studies on wh-in-situ languages put this generalization into question: Kim and Goodall (2016) found that Korean wh-DPs are sensitive to wh-islands; Omaki et al (2020) found that Japanese in-situ wh-adverbs are equally insensitive to subject islands as in-situ wh-DPs; Lu et al (2020) found that Chinese wh-DPs and wh-adverbs are both sensitive to relative clause islands. 2 Crucially, Lu et al (2020) pointed out that the acceptability contrasts between wh-DPs and wh-adverbs inside island structures (e.g., the contrast between (3/4a) and (3/4b)) was due to a penalty of long distance covert movement of wh-adverbs, which has nothing to do with island sensitivity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Island-sensitivity of two different interpretations of why in Chinese

Kim

Li²,

Lu³

2023

Front. Psychol.

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It has been assumed that the wh-element weishenme “why” in Chinese has two distinct interpretations: a reason reading, which typically yields yinwei “because”-answers, and a purpose reading, which typically triggers weile “in order to”-answers. It is claimed that the two interpretations differ in island sensitivity: the reason weishenme is sensitive to islands while the purpose weishenme is not. Assuming that the reason weishenme is a wh-adverb without finer internal structure, while the purpose weishenme is a wh-PP consisting of the preposition wei “for” and a wh-DP shenme “what,” this contrast in island sensitivity can be considered as an instance of a broader generalization: the so-called argument-adjunct asymmetry (or the DP-adverb asymmetry) of wh-in-situ island sensitivity. However, recent experimental studies provided mixed findings on whether the argument-adjunct asymmetry of wh-in-situ island sensitivity actually holds. The current study focuses on the two interpretations of weishenme “why/for what” in Chinese, and provides evidence using a formal acceptability judgment experiment that the two weishenmes are both sensitive to islands, contrary to previous generalizations. Our results provide further empirical challenge to the so-called argument-adjunct asymmetry of wh-in-situ island sensitivity.

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Subextraction in Japanese and subject-object symmetry

Cited by 26 publications

References 65 publications

On the nature of the discourse effect on extraction in Japanese

On the nature of the discourse effect on extraction in Japanese

Sentence Acceptability Experiments: What, How, and Why

Island-sensitivity of two different interpretations of why in Chinese

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