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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Rapid Access to Scalar Implicatures in Adjacency Pair Contexts: Experimental Evidence in Spanish

Languages ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Loredo ◽  
Juan E. Kamienkowski ◽  
Virginia Jaichenco
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Conversational Implicature ◽  
Scalar Implicatures ◽  
Reading Task ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Rapid Access ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

A conversational implicature arises when there is a gap between the syntactically and semantically encoded meaning of a sentence and the pragmatic meaning that is inferred in an actual communicative situation. Several experimental studies have approached the processing of implicatures and examined the extent to which the derivation of the pragmatic meaning is effortful, especially in the case of generalized implicatures, where the inferred meaning seems to be the most frequent one. In this study, we present two experiments that explore the processing of scalar implicatures with algunos ‘some’ in adjacency pair contexts through an acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task. Our results support the claim that the access to the meaning of some as only some is context sensitive. Moreover, they also indicate that adjacency pair structure contributes to making that meaning rapidly available.

Locative Inversion, PP Topicalization, and Weak Crossover in English

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN BRUENING
Keyword(s):  
Judgment Task ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Variable Binding ◽  
Weak Crossover ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Locative Inversion ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

The literature on locative inversion in English currently disputes whether locative inversion differs from PP topicalization in permitting a quantifier in the fronted PP to bind a pronoun in the subject. In order to resolve this dispute, this paper runs two experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one an acceptability judgment task and the other a forced-choice task. Both find that PP topicalization does not differ from locative inversion: both permit variable binding. Locative inversion also does not differ from a minimally different sentence with the overt expletive there. These findings remove an argument against the null expletive analysis of English locative inversion, and they also show that weak crossover is not uniformly triggered by A-bar movement.

Narrow presentational focus in Mexican Spanish: Experimental evidence

Probus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Hoot
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
Sentence Stress ◽  
Information Focus ◽  
Canonical Position ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

AbstractIt is most often claimed that in Spanish constituents in narrow presentational or information focus appear rightmost, where they also receive main sentence stress, while shifting the stress to the focus in its canonical position is infelicitous. Some, however, claim that Spanish in fact has recourse to both strategies for making the focus prominent, and some recent quantitative work has shown support for this alternative view. The present paper contributes to this debate by experimentally testing the realization of presentational focus in Mexican Spanish using an acceptability judgment task. The results of the experiment reveal that, for these speakers, focused constituents need not be rightmost and can in fact be stressed in non-final position, contra the consensus view. These findings expand the database on focus in Spanish and indicate that theories of the prosody/syntax interface may need to be revised, especially those theories that motivate discourse-related syntactic movement based on the requirements of the prosody.

Methodological problems related to research on L2 Norwegian anaphors

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guro Busterud
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Finite Clause ◽  
Local Binding

This article focuses on the methodological challenges involved in investigating anaphoric binding in Norwegian as a second language. Norwegian anaphors can be bound both locally and non-locally, and since anaphors vary cross-linguistically, it is interesting to explore whether and where L2 speakers of Norwegian allow such target-like local and non-local binding in their L2. Sentences with two possible antecedents might be ambiguous for L2 speakers, and the truth-value judgment task is generally considered to be the best method for eliciting knowledge of L2 speakers' intuitions of anaphoric binding in ambiguous sentences. In Norwegian, long-distance binding cannot cross a finite clause boundary, and the long-distance anaphor cannot be locally bound. Because of this, the truth-value judgment task is sometimes less adequate for testing all relevant binding structures in Norwegian. Dialectal variations in Norwegian pose additional challenges for the study of the acquisition of anaphors in an L2. This paper discusses the implications of these methodological challenges.

Experimental evidence supporting the overlapping distribution of core and exempt anaphors: Re-examination of long-distance bound caki-casin in Korean

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (6) ◽  
pp. 1775-1806
Author(s):  
Eun Hee Kim ◽  
James Yoon
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
Distance Bound ◽  
Local Binding ◽  
Rule Out

AbstractThe Korean anaphor caki-casin, which has been regarded as a local anaphor, has been shown to allow long-distance binding when local binding is not an option (Kim, Ji-Hye & James Yoon. 2009. Long-distance bound local anaphors in Korean: An empirical study of the Korean anaphor caki-casin. Lingua 119. 733–755). In this study, we examined the long-distance binding of caki-casin in domains where local binding is possible, and compare it with the long-distance binding of caki, the representative long-distance anaphor in Korean. Our investigation revealed that the availability of local binding does not rule out long-distance/exempt binding of caki-casin. The results imply that core and exempt binding may not be in complementary distribution, at least in Korean.

scholarly journals Proficiency and working memory based explanations for nonnative speakers’ sensitivity to agreement in sentence processing

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAITLIN E. COUGHLIN ◽  
ANNIE TREMBLAY
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Morphological Processing ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

ABSTRACTThis study examines the roles of proficiency and working memory (WM) capacity in second-/foreign-language (L2) learners’ processing of agreement morphology. It investigates the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical short- and long-distance number agreement dependencies by native English speakers at two proficiencies in French, and the relationship between their proficiency and WM capacity in French and their sensitivity to agreement violations. Native English speakers at mid- and high proficiencies in French and native French speakers completed an acceptability judgment task, a self-paced reading task, and a WM task in French, and the English speakers also completed a WM task in English. The results showed that whereas all participants performed at ceiling on the acceptability judgment tasks, only the high-level L2 learners and native speakers showed some sensitivity to number agreement violations. For L2 learners, this sensitivity did not vary as a function of the length of the agreement dependency. The results also indicated that L2 learners tended to be more sensitive to agreement violations as their WM memory capacity in French increased. The implications of these results for theories of L2 morphological processing are discussed.

scholarly journals A compositional approach to conjunct agreement in Turkish

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Yilmaz Koylu
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Full Agreement ◽  
Compositional Approach ◽  
Closest Conjunct Agreement ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Two Stages ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

This article presents novel empirical evidence on verbal agreement patterns observed in conjunction phrases (CPs) in Turkish. To account for the discrepancies observed in native speaker preferences in agreement paradigms in CPs, two experimental tasks were carried out: namely an acceptability judgment task and a forced choice task. Based on the results, it is proposed that there is compositional conjunct agreement in Turkish that takes place in two stages. The agreement relationship is first established between the Agreement head and the coordinated phrase in the syntax. Then, the PF spells out the features of either the coordinated phrase, or the features of the linearly closest conjunct inside the coordinated phrase. I argue that Full Agreement (FA) results from the Spec-head agreement with the CP, whereby the features of both conjuncts are resolved and inherited to the CP (Johannessen 1996). In Closest Conjunct Agreement (CCA), on the other hand, the agreeing head has asymmetric access to one of the prominent conjuncts or its features (Bošković 2009; Johannessen 1998; Munn 1993, 1999; Benmamoun 1992). Thus, in CCA in Turkish, the agreement is with the linearly closest conjunct and the features of that conjunct appear on the verb.

scholarly journals Polarity sensitivity of question embedding: experimental evidence

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thom Van Gessel ◽  
Alexandre Cremers ◽  
Floris Roelofsen
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
Polarity Sensitivity ◽  
Universal Quantifiers ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

Attitude predicates can be classified by the kinds of complements they can embed: declaratives, interrogatives or both. However, several authors have claimed that predicates like be certain can only embed interrogatives in specific environments. According to Mayr, these are exactly the environments that license negative polarity items (NPIs). In his analysis, both NPIs and embedded interrogatives are licensed by the same semantic strengthening procedure. If this is right, one would expect a correlation between acceptability of be certain whether and NPIs. The analysis also predicts a contrast between antecedents vs. consequents of conditionals and restrictors vs. scopes of universal quantifiers. This paper tests these predictions experimentally through an acceptability judgment task. We find that judgments for be certain whether do not correlate with judgments on NPIs, which suggests that be certain whether and NPIs are in fact licensed by different mechanisms.

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