The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax

Experimental syntax is an area that is rapidly growing as linguistic research becomes increasingly focused on replicable language data, in both fieldwork and laboratory environments. The first of its kind, this handbook provides an in-depth overview of current issues and trends in this field, with contributions from leading international scholars. It pays special attention to sentence acceptability experiments, outlining current best practices in conducting tests, and pointing out promising new avenues for future research. Separate sections review research results from the past 20 years, covering specific syntactic phenomena and language types. The handbook also outlines other common psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods for studying syntax, comparing and contrasting them with acceptability experiments, and giving useful perspectives on the interplay between theoretical and experimental linguistics. Providing an up-to-date reference on this exciting field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics interested in using experimental methods to conduct syntactic research.

Finnegans Wake: Beyond the Limits of Translation

Many deem James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake an untranslatable novel. Despite this, the characteristics that appear to obscure its meaning, such as semantic multiplicity and experimental syntax, also make it particularly open to interpretation and resignification—thus, to translation. The present paper proposes a flexible, creative, playful, and free approach to its translation. I discuss the possibilities derived from such an approach through the analysis and translation of fragments of Finnegans Wake into Spanish, and I support this approach to the translation process with some of the most prominent research on the translations of Joyce’s works, up to date scholarship from Translation Studies, and relevant testimonies from Joyce himself and from translators and writers who have studied his literary production. I argue that Finnegans Wake is a text that tries to capture language itself, transcends linguistic barriers by resisting rigidity of meaning, and achieves an “openness” and freedom that, paradoxically, have somewhat limited the efforts to translate it. Therefore, I propose that if Joyce did not limit himself in his creative process, it is necessary that we, as readers and translators, accept without fear the challenges presented to us by Finnegans Wake and dare to create new art from it.

Linguistic Intuitions

In recent years there has been an increased interest in the evidential status and use of linguistic intuitions. This volume provides the most recent cutting-edge contributions from linguists and philosophers working on this topic. The volume is organized around two questions that have been at the heart of this debate: the justification question, which asks about a theoretical rationale for using linguistic intuitions as evidence in the study of language, and the methodology question, which asks whether formal methods of gathering intuitions are epistemically and methodologically superior to informal ones. The first part of the volume addresses the justification question and covers a broad range of novel theoretical contributions that either justify or critically evaluate the evidential use of linguistic intuitions. The second part of the volume presents and critically discusses recent developments in the domain of experimental syntax, where the methodology question has been debated. All chapters seek to shed new light on whether and how linguistic intuitions can be used in theorizing about language.

Experiments in syntax and philosophy

Within Chomskyan syntax, linguistic intuitions have traditionally been gathered informally from small samples of linguists. Since the mid-1990s, however, several linguists have called for more “scientific” methods, including the use of larger sample sizes of ordinary speakers and the use of statistics. The first part of this chapter discusses whether such an “experimental approach” to obtaining syntactical intuitions is really methodologically superior to the informal approach, as is sometimes claimed. The answer is thought to be: not always. In the second part our attention turns to another academic field in which intuitions arguably play an evidential role, namely philosophy. Here, too, critics have demanded that intuitions be harvested more systematically; they have even appealed to experimental syntax in order to support their cause. However, given our assessment, experimental methods in syntax can be a model for the promotion of experimental methods in philosophy only under certain conditions.

Some practical considerations for using audio stimuli in acceptability judgment experiments

In this paper, we argue that moving away from written stimuli in acceptability judgment experiments is a necessary step to address the systematic exclusion of particular empirical phenomena, languages/varieties, and speakers in (psycho)linguistics (e.g., Anand, Chung, & Wagers 2011). We provide user-friendly guidelines for conducting acceptability experiments which use audio stimuli in three platforms: Praat, Qualtrics, and PennController for Ibex (Zehr & Schwarz 2018). Finally, we qualitatively compare the results of two experiments investigating English constituent order using audio and written stimuli. We hope this paper will not only increase the types of languages, speakers, and phenomena which are included in experimental syntax, but help researchers who are interested in conducting experiments overcome the initial learning curve.

Experiments in syntax and philosophy: the method of choice?

Within Chomskyan syntax, linguistic intuitions have traditionally been gathered informally from small samples of linguists. Since the mid-1990s, however, several linguists have called for more “scientific” methods, including the use of larger sample sizes of ordinary speakers and the use of statistics. In the first part of this chapter, we discuss whether such an “experimental approach” to obtaining syntactical intuitions is really methodologically superior to the informal approach, as sometimes claimed. We think the answer is: not always. In the second part, we turn our attention to another academic field in which intuitions arguably play an evidential role, namely philosophy. Also here, critics have demanded that intuitions be harvested more systematically and have even appealed to experimental syntax in order to support their cause. However, given our assessment, experimental methods in syntax can be a model for the promotion of experimental methods in philosophy only under certain conditions.

Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff Modeling and its Interface with Experimental Syntax

In this chapter, we review key insights gained by using the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) technique to address psycholinguistic and linguistic issues. SAT evidence has been instrumental in integrating sophisticated memory models into psycholinguistic theory, and bears on several linguistic issues in experimental syntax. We explain how SAT can provide clear evidence about time course of processing that is unconfounded by accuracy or probability of interpretation over trials, and in so doing, can fruitfully inform debates about processing and representation.

Two (non-) islands in Slovenian: A study in Experimental Syntax

There exists a controversy in the literature and among the speakers of Slovenian concerning the grammaticality of wh-island and subject island constructions in this language. We conducted an acceptability rating study of wh-islands and subject islands in Slovenian, using the factorial definition of island. This definition provides for a possibility to isolate a true island effect while controlling for two complexity factors that potentially interfere in speakers’ evaluation of the relevant sentences: the length of the respective movement dependency and the presence of an island structure itself. We found that (i) Slovenian speakers do judge the wh-island sentences worse than the respective controls, but the observed degradation cannot be attributed to a true island effect; (ii) subject extraction out of a wh-island leads to a so called reverse island effect whereby the acceptability is higher than expected even if the above two complexity factors are taken into consideration; and (iii) speakers are sensitive to the subject island effect, as predicted by the mainstream theories of syntactic locality. The results of our study contribute to establishing a solid empirical base for further theoretical investigations of the island effects and raise new questions about the role of processing factors in speakers’ evaluations of island constructions.

In defense of linguists’ introspections. A view from a generativist’s perspective

There is a widespread criticism of the use of linguists’ introspective judgments as data in syntactic generative research. The critics point to a few major inadequacies of this type of data. First of all, data from introspections are claimed to be unreliable and heavily biased, but also simply irrelevant by not representing real utterances produced in real situations. In view of some critics such inadequacies disqualify linguists’ judgments as legitimate data, other authors concede that they remain a viable source of data but should always be cross-checked by other types of evidence which typically include: corpus data, experimental syntax data, and empirical evidence provided by neuro- and psycholinguistic experimentation.The aims of the paper are: (i) to raise a point in defense of the validity and practical non-substitutability of introspective data in generative research, (ii) to assess the practical utility of the new types of evidence for generativists’ needs. The way to achieve these goals will be by analyzing how a specific research problem (