Experimental Evidence on Island Effects in Spanish Relative Clauses

Probus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-296
Author(s):  
Laura Stigliano ◽  
Ming Xiang
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Experimental Paradigm ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Judgment Study ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

Abstract Research on islands has been central to linguistic theory for more than 50 years. Its importance relies on the theoretical consequences islands posit for movement and long distance dependencies. In this paper we aim to explore the contrast between a variety of islands in Spanish relative clauses to reveal whether there is any gradience in the strength of the island effects. In order to tease apart fine-grained contrasts we run an acceptability judgment study based on the factorial definition of island, an experimental paradigm that aims to isolate the various factors that can affect the acceptability of a sentence involving island violations. Overall, we found that the five constructions tested (embedded wh-questions, whether-clauses, adjuncts, complex NPs and relative clauses) show island effects in Spanish and that there are limited differences in the size of these effects, which points to a more categorical view of islands.

Experimental Evidence on Island Effects in Spanish Relative Clauses

Probus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Stigliano ◽  
Ming Xiang
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Experimental Paradigm ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Judgment Study ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

Abstract Research on islands has been central to linguistic theory for more than 50 years. Its importance relies on the theoretical consequences islands posit for movement and long distance dependencies. In this paper we aim to explore the contrast between a variety of islands in Spanish relative clauses to reveal whether there is any gradience in the strength of the island effects. In order to tease apart fine-grained contrasts we run an acceptability judgment study based on the factorial definition of island, an experimental paradigm that aims to isolate the various factors that can affect the acceptability of a sentence involving island violations. Overall, we found that the five constructions tested (embedded wh-questions, whether-clauses, adjuncts, complex NPs and relative clauses) show island effects in Spanish and that there are limited differences in the size of these effects, which points to a more categorical view of islands.

scholarly journals ¬Learning Island-insensitivity from the input: A corpus analysis of child- and youth-directed text in Norwegian

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dave Kush ◽  
Charlotte Sant ◽  
Sunniva Briså Strætkvern
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Learning Models ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Embedded Questions ◽  
Reading Material

Norwegian allows filler-gap dependencies into relative clauses (RCs) and embedded questions (EQs) – domains that are usually considered islands. We conducted a corpus study on youth-directed reading material to assess what direct evidence Norwegian children receive for filler-gap dependencies into islands. Results suggest that the input contains examples of Filler-gap dependencies into both RCs and EQs, but such examples are significantly less frequent than long-distance filler-gap dependencies into non-island clauses. Moreover, evidence for island violations is characterized by the absence of forms that are, in principle, acceptable in the target grammar. Thus, although they encounter dependencies into islands, children must generalize beyond the fine-grained distributional characteristics of the input to acquire the full pattern of island-insensitivity in their target language. We conclude by considering how different learning models would fare on acquiring the target generalizations.

scholarly journals An experimental reassessment of complex NP islands with NP-scrambling in Japanese

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shin Fukuda ◽  
Nozomi Tanaka ◽  
Hajime Ono ◽  
Jon Sprouse
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Small Island ◽  
Typical Sample ◽  
Island Effect ◽  
Null Result ◽  
Complement Clause ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Syntactic Theories ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a complement clause headed by to yuu ‘that say’ are islands for NP-scrambling dependencies. To explore this question, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments using the factorial definition of islands to test the island status of noun complements, relative clauses (which are complex NPs, but uniformly considered islands in the literature), and coordinated NP structures (which are also uniformly considered islands in the literature). Our first experiment yielded clear evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands, and that noun complements are not. Our second experiment replicated the relative clause and coordinated NP results, but yielded an inconclusive null result for noun complements. Taken together, our results suggest either that noun complements are not islands, or that noun complements yield a small island effect that cannot be reliably detected at the typical sample sizes of 30-40 participants used here. We also investigated between- and within-participant variability in our results. We observe no evidence of increased between-participant variability for noun complements relative to other islands, and no increase of within-participant variability for noun complements relative to grammatical NP-scrambling, thus corroborating our conclusions. Our results have consequences for a number of issues that have been encoded in current syntactic theories of island effects, including the correlation between syntactic constituent complexity and island status (e.g., number of bounding nodes or phase heads), and the correlation between complementizer deletion and island status (e.g., the complement/adjunct distinction).

Long-distance dependencies

2019 ◽  
pp. 652-725
Author(s):  
Mary Dalrymple ◽  
John J. Lowe ◽  
Louise Mycock
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Weak Crossover ◽  
Parasitic Gaps ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Syntactic Function ◽  
The One

This chapter explores the analysis of constructions in which a constituent appears in a position other than the one with which its syntactic function is usually associated. Section 17.1 discusses the syntax of long-distance dependencies, including topicalization, left- or right-dislocation constructions, relative clauses, and constituent (“wh”) questions. Section 17.2 discusses constructions in which the displaced phrase is related not to a gap within the clause, but to a resumptive pronoun. Section 17.3 discusses how a long-distance dependency construction may be marked morphologically. Section 17.4 considers evidence for and against traces, with particular attention to the phenomenon of weak crossover. Section 17.5 examines multiple-gap constructions, including “across-the-board” extraction and parasitic gaps. The semantics of constructions involving long-distance dependencies are then considered: relative clauses are discussed in Section 17.6, and constituent (“wh”) questions in Section 17.7.

scholarly journals Variation in adjunct islands: The case of Norwegian

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Ingrid Bondevik ◽  
Dave Kush ◽  
Terje Lohndal
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Syntactic Category ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Island Type ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

Finite adjunct clauses are often assumed to be among the strongest islands for filler–gap dependency creation cross-linguistically, but Kush, Lohndal & Sprouse (2019) found experimental evidence suggesting that finite conditional om-adjunct clauses are not islands for topicalization in Norwegian. To investigate the generality of these findings, we ran three acceptability judgment experiments testing topicalization out of three adjunct clause types: om ‘if’, når ‘when’ and fordi ‘because’ in Norwegian. Largely replicating Kush et al. (2019), we find evidence for the absence of strong island effects with topicalization from om-adjuncts in all three experiments. We find island effects for når- and fordi-adjuncts, but the size of the effects and the underlying judgment distributions that produce those effects differ greatly by island type. Our results suggest that the syntactic category ‘adjunct’ may not constitute a suitably fine-grained grouping to explain variation in island effects.

scholarly journals Long distance binding option for the Mandarin Chinese reflexive taziji

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuhang Xu ◽  
Jeffrey Runner
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Clausal Structure ◽  
Embedded Clause ◽  
Local Binding ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

Contradicting prevailing claims in the literature, we report experimental evidence showing that the Chinese reflexive taziji has both local and long-distance binding options. We per-formed a series of formal judgment experiments manipulating the gender feature of the potential antecedents such that they matched or mismatched the anaphor’s gender using a bi-clausal structure with an argument reflexive in the embedded clause (e.g., Name1-says-Name2-Verb-taziji). Participants were asked to choose the antecedent of the anaphor (antecedent choice task) and also to judge the acceptability of the sentence (acceptability judgment task). Results showed that the reflexive taziji had both long-distance and local binding options, although the local binding option was preferred. Also, the pattern was replicated for the original examples taken from a widely used Chinese syntax textbook (Huang et al. 2009), contra the judgments reported there. We discuss the implications of this study from both theoretical and methodological perspectives.

scholarly journals Coconuts and curtain cakes: The production of wh-questions in ASD

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 239694152098295
Author(s):  
Nufar Sukenik ◽  
Eléonore Morin ◽  
Naama Friedmann ◽  
Philippe Prevost ◽  
Laurice Tuller
Keyword(s):  
Error Analysis ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Production Rates ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Analysis Of Error ◽  
Error Types

Background and aims Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been found to exhibit difficulties in wh-question production. It is unclear whether these difficulties are pragmatic or syntactic in nature. The current study used a question elicitation task to assess the production of subject and object wh-questions of children with ASD in two different languages (Hebrew and French) wherein the syntactic structure of wh-questions is different, a fact that may contribute to better understanding of the underlying deficits affecting wh-question production. Crucially, beyond the general correct/error rate we also performed an in-depth analysis of error types, comparing syntactic to pragmatic errors and comparing the distribution of errors in the ASD group to that of children with typical development (TD) and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Results Correct production rates were found to be similar for the ASD and DLD groups, but error analysis revealed important differences between the ASD groups in the two languages and the DLD group. The Hebrew- and French ASD groups were found to produce pragmatic errors, which were not found in children with DLD. The pragmatic errors were similar in the two ASD groups. Syntactic errors were affected by the structure of each language. Conclusions Our results have shown that although the two ASD groups come from different countries and speak different languages, the correct production rates and more importantly, the error types were very similar in the two ASD groups, and very different compared to TD children and children with DLD. Implications: Our results highlight the importance of creating research tasks that test different linguistic functions independently and strengthen the need for conducting fine-grained error analysis to differentiate between groups and gain insights into the deficits underlying each of them.

scholarly journals Non-Local and Multi-Scale Mechanisms for Image Inpainting

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3281
Author(s):  
Xu He ◽  
Yong Yin
Keyword(s):  
Markov Random Fields ◽  
Receptive Fields ◽  
Image Inpainting ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Visual Appearance ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multi Scale ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Relationship Of

Recently, deep learning-based techniques have shown great power in image inpainting especially dealing with squared holes. However, they fail to generate plausible results inside the missing regions for irregular and large holes as there is a lack of understanding between missing regions and existing counterparts. To overcome this limitation, we combine two non-local mechanisms including a contextual attention module (CAM) and an implicit diversified Markov random fields (ID-MRF) loss with a multi-scale architecture which uses several dense fusion blocks (DFB) based on the dense combination of dilated convolution to guide the generative network to restore discontinuous and continuous large masked areas. To prevent color discrepancies and grid-like artifacts, we apply the ID-MRF loss to improve the visual appearance by comparing similarities of long-distance feature patches. To further capture the long-term relationship of different regions in large missing regions, we introduce the CAM. Although CAM has the ability to create plausible results via reconstructing refined features, it depends on initial predicted results. Hence, we employ the DFB to obtain larger and more effective receptive fields, which benefits to predict more precise and fine-grained information for CAM. Extensive experiments on two widely-used datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches both in quantity and quality.

Grammatik der Narration

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-494
Author(s):  
Sonja Zeman
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
The Status ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Narrative Syntax

AbstractIs there a ‚narrative syntax‘, i. e. a special grammar restricted to narrative fiction? Starting from this question which has been investigated since early structuralism, the paper focusses on grammatical characteristics of narrative discourse mode and their implications for a linguistic theory of narration. Its goal is two-fold: In a first step, the traditional accounts by Benveniste, Hamburger, Kuroda and recent typological studies are brought together in order to support the claim that the distinction between narrative and non-narrative discourse mode is a fundamental one that has consequences for the use of grammar. In a second step, I discuss three central questions within the intersection between narrative micro- and macro-structures, namely (i) the definition of narrativity, (ii) the status of the narrator, and (iii) the relation between narration and fictionality. In sum, the article argues that investigations on the ‘grammar of narration’ do not just offer insights into a specific text configuration next to others, but are deeply linked to fundamental theoretical questions concerning the architecture of language – and that the comparison between linguistic and narratological categories offers a potential for addressing them.

scholarly journals Datives with psych nouns and adjectives in Basque

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-696
Author(s):  
Beatriz Fernández ◽  
Fernando Zúñiga ◽  
Ane Berro
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Formal Expression ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Psych Verbs ◽  
Other Regarding ◽  
Psychological Verbs

Abstract This paper explores the formal expression of two Basque dative argument types in combination with psych nouns and adjectives, in intransitive and transitive clauses: (i) those that express the experiencer, and (ii) those that express the stimulus of the psychological state denoted by the psych noun and adjective. In the intransitive structure involving a dative experiencer (DatExpIS), the stimulus is in the absolutive case, and the intransitive copula izan ‘be’ shows both dative and absolutive agreement. This construction basically corresponds to those built upon the piacere type of psychological verbs typified in (Belletti, Adriana & Luigi Rizzi. 1988. Psych-verbs and θ-theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6. 291–352) three-way classification of Italian psych verbs. In the intransitive structure involving a dative stimulus (DatStimIS), the experiencer is marked by absolutive case, and the same intransitive copula shows both absolutive and dative agreement (with the latter corresponding to the dative stimulus and not to the experiencer). We show that the behavior of the dative argument in the two constructions is just the opposite of each other regarding a number of morphosyntactic tests, including agreement, constituency, hierarchy and selection. Additionally, we explore two parallel transitive constructions that involve either a dative experiencer and an ergative stimulus (DatExpTS) or a dative stimulus and an ergative experiencer (DatStimTS), which employ the transitive copula *edun ‘have’. Considering these configurations, we propose an extended and more fine-grained typology of psych predicates.

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