Why do we need another book about unbounded dependencies? A review article on Chaves & Putnam’s Unbounded Dependency Constructions

Unbounded dependencies (UDs), in wh-interrogatives, relative clauses and other constructions, have been a major focus of syntactic research for more than half a century. The most widely assumed approach analyzes them in terms of movement and views island phenomena as largely a matter of syntax. Both these positions are problematic. Moreover, they stem from assumptions that have been at the heart of syntactic theorizing for many decades. Chaves and Putnam present evidence that both the dominant approach to UDs and the general approach to syntax from which it derives are flawed. They argue for a non-movement approach to UDs and a largely non-syntactic approach to island phenomena, and for an approach to syntax which has the relation between linguistic knowledge and language use and the complexity of acceptability judgements as central concerns. Their book is an important one that could have a major impact both on research on UDs and on syntactic research more generally.

Extraction constraints

This chapter offers a detailed survey of the constraints that restrict filler-gap dependencies (island constraints), and argues that there are several different kinds of island constraints, due to different combinations of independently motivated factors. Most importantly, it argues that most islands are not cross-constructionally active. That is, most island phenomena are restricted to certain kinds of unbounded dependency constructions (e.g. interrogatives, or relative clauses). In particular, several island types are primarily caused by drawing the hearer’s attention to a fronted referent that is not at-issue, and is of little consequence to what the utterance convey. Such an account emerges naturally from the observation that not all propositions express equally likely states of affairs and that different constructions come with different biases with respect to how information structure is packaged, and consequently, to which referents it is pragmatically licit to single out. The chapter concludes with a discussion of resumption and supposed island effects in other types of construction.

The acquisition of UDCs

This chapter focuses on behavioral evidence concerning acquisition of unbounded dependency constructions and island phenomena. It provides a general overview of their acquisitional trajectory in normal developing L1, focusing on the emergence of filler-gap dependencies from one-word constructions to multi-clausal constructions, as well as island effects. The chapter argues that the gradual and frequency-based developmental evidence is consistent with an exemplar-based approach that contains rich morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information along the lines of the empiricist perspective. In particular, the extant evidence supports a usage-based view in which the growth of a grammar proceeds from simple units to more complex ones, exploiting the frequency of simple as well as complex exemplars. The chapter concludes by describing a exemplar- and chunk-based account of grammar development, composed of rich information that is probabilistic in nature, and shaped by experience.

Movement-based approaches

This chapter discusses how the Minimalist Program (MP) strives to model unbounded dependency constructions and island constraints, and discusses the empirical, theoretical and cognitive status of syntactic displacement (movement), as formalized in terms of Internal Merge. At the present time, modelling filler-gap dependencies via movement faces significant theoretical and empirical issues. There is no parsimonious account of successive cyclic movement in the MP because of the Triggering Problem, nor of convergent and cumulative filler-gap dependencies. Other problems concern island phenomena, which have been argued to follow from core architectural economy constraints, but which make incorrect predictions not only about islands, but also about unbounded dependency constructions more generally. Finally, the MP has also been difficult to reconcile with extant psycholinguistic evidence about language processing. All recent attempts to make the MP consistent with incremental sentence processing adopt phrase-structural information, and abandon movement altogether.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the phenomena that will be discussed in the remainder of the book, discusses how these are modelled in a variety of frameworks, and how human beings process such filler-gap dependencies. The chapter concludes with five overarching questions, each of which is the topic of subsequent chapters: (1) What is the possible range of filler-gap dependency types? In particular, what patterns arise when there are multiple gaps?; (2) Is there a common constraint at work in most or all island phenomena?; (3) What are the advantages or disadvantages of movement-based versus non-movement-based approaches? (4) How can a theory of grammar account for the fact that some (but not other) island violations have gradient acceptability, are prone to frequency effects, and are sensitive to contextual information? (5) How can unbounded dependency constructions be learned by speakers? Does the evidence favor nativist approaches or domain-general experience-based approaches?

Investigation of the feasibility of energy piles in Bangkok and their impacts on pile behavior

The energy pile concept, which involves using piles as heat exchanging units for ground source heat pump (GSHP) system, have recently been proposed as a promising way of using shallow geothermal energy resource for cooling buildings to improve energy efficiency and reduce the heat island phenomena in Bangkok Thailand. The power rating of heat exchange capacity of the piles is one of the most important design parameters to consider when evaluating the feasibility of the system. In this study, a full-scale thermal response test was conducted on a spun pile equipped with a single U-loop with the power rating of 60 W/m, yielding the effective thermal conductivity of 3.3 W/m°C, while that on steel micro pile yielded the value between 1.49 and 2.01 W/m°C with power rating of 10W/m. Effects of possible thermal cycles on the compression of Bangkok sand was also investigated in order to evaluate any adverse effects of using piles on pile settlement.