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Form deviation and constraints on productivity: A study of comp-gap and intervention effects in English and Swedish
Abstract
Issues concerning the nature of so-called ‘filler-gap’ constructions and the constraints on their acceptability in different languages have for a long time been at the center of the linguistic debate. In more recent years, claims have often been made that many or all constraints on such constructions can be explained in terms of processing restrictions, properties of information structure, or limits to attention. However, in the present paper I will argue that at least some of these constraints cannot be explained by such factors. Instead, I will claim that speakers’ judgements of acceptability could be negatively affected if the syntactic structure of a productively formed instance of a schematic construction is not sufficiently similar to the prototypical entrenched structure of the same construction. Importantly, this might happen whether the relevant form is a phonological pattern, or a pattern of schematic syntactic categories. I will show how the proposed principles have the potential to explain a number of well-known constraints which have generally not been regarded as related. More specifically, I will show how the principles can account for some striking similarities between filler-gap constraints in English and Swedish, as well as some unexpected differences. I will also argue that the filler-gap constraint referred to as the
complementizer-gap
effect can be explained by the same principles that are involved in phenomena such as restrictions on
wanna
-contraction in English and adjective defectiveness in Swedish. The analysis will be based on the constructional approaches of Croft (2001) and Verhagen (2009), and some crucial issues will concern the relationship between syntactic and phonological structure in a construction, and the notions of non-iconic constituency and gradient syntactic attachment.
In many languages, Ā-extraction of local subject arguments behaves differently from the extraction of other arguments, for example in triggering specialized morphosyntactic processes or being subject to additional restrictions. I argue that many such interactions are due to an anti-locality constraint on movement, which bans movement which is too short. Subject extraction is often distinguished due to the high canonical position of subjects in their clauses (e.g. Spec,TP), making their movement to the clause edge (e.g. Spec,CP) uniquely in danger of violating the Spec-to-Spec Anti-Locality constraint (Erlewine 2016). Concretely, three subject extraction asymmetry behaviors are discussed and analyzed: complementizer-trace effects, subject anti-agreement effects, and bans on subject resumption, including the so-called Highest Subject Restriction. In each case, we observe that the special behavior associated with subject extraction (a) can be obviated by increasing the distance of movement, (b) also applies to exceptionally high non-subjects, and (c) does not correlate with other subjecthood properties. These facts are straightforwardly explained by the anti-locality-based approach to these asymmetries, but are challenging for alternative accounts.
This paper concerns crosslinguistic differences in the acceptability of so-called relative clause extraction constructions, exemplified by the unacceptable English sentence *
This boat I know the guy that owns
(associated with the acceptable canonical sentence
I know the guy that owns this boat
). It has sometimes been argued, since Ross (1967), that such extractions are universally blocked by a syntactic constraint. However, following observations of such structures in English and other languages, some linguists have argued that such sentences have varying degrees of acceptability and that the degree of acceptability depends on attention limits and pragmatic foregroundedness/backgroundedness. Another view which appears to have gained ground in recent years is one where the degree of acceptability is directly related to processing difficulty. The analysis presented in this paper is based on a comparison between English and Swedish, and includes authentic data, examples previously discussed in the literature, as well as acceptability-tested invented sentences. In the end it will be argued that, while the dominance- and processing-based proposals are on the right track, there is a more plausible and straightforward way of explaining the observed crosslinguistic variation using the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar. Thus, an alternative account will be presented drawing on general principles which are well established within cognitive- and construction-based theories.
Syntactic island constraints are generally viewed as paradigmatic evidence for the autonomy of syntax. However, the existence of exceptions has been known for some time. Close examination reveals that these exceptional phenomena resist purely syntactic explanations, requiring instead an account in terms of semantic relations like attribution, various kinds of semantic framing effects, and discourse variables like topic and focus. It will be argued that the syntactic and extrasyntactic factors which limit extraction can be subsumed into a general account based on a cognitive theory of attention. According to the analysis presented below, extraction phenomena represent a situation in which the language user must attend simultaneously to two parts of the syntactic structure; a situation which strains the limited working memory available for automatic syntactic processing. Long-range extraction takes place under conditions which reduce that processing strain, that is, when both the extracted element and the matrix for extraction command attention anyway. In other words, the factors which control the distribution of long-range extraction do so indirectly through their impact on the distribution of attention.
The aim of this paper is to re-examine constraints on relative clause formation in languages of the world. The main tasks of the study are thus two-fold: to present a new formulation of one of the main constraints on relativization, and to challenge an assumption of the most robust typological interpretation of relative clause constraints to date-the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy.
This chapter examines the phonology of perceptibility effects and proposes a distinct grammatical component called the P-map (P stands for perceptibility), a set of statements about relative perceptibility of different contrasts in various positions. It argues that nasalization, C-deletion, and so forth are unattested as responses to the voicing problem. After discussing sources of evidence for the P-map, the chapter considers a P-map account of voicing neutralization, with an emphasis on differences of relative similarity, voicing vs. precedence relative to the verb, feature transfer, alternative views on correspondence and constraint interactions, and P-Map effects in cluster simplification. It also explores epenthetic glottals and epenthetic schwa.
One of the fundamental ideas in generative grammar has been that man possesses a partly innate system of language, his so called linguistic competence. The most important part of competence is a set of syntactic rules that determine the structure of the sentences in a language. In describing these rules it is not adequate simply to describe the rules themselves. To characterize a possible human language one must say what is impossible just as much as what is possible.
A number of researchers have claimed that questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies (LDDs) are acquired relatively early, by age 4 or even earlier, in spite of their complexity. Analysis of LDD questions in the input available to children suggests that they are extremely stereotypical, raising the possibility that children learn lexically specific templates such as WH do you think S-GAP? rather than general rules of the kind postulated in traditional linguistic accounts of this construction. We describe three elicited imitation experiments with children aged from 4;6 to 6;9 and adult controls. Participants were asked to repeat prototypical questions (i.e., questions which match the hypothesised template), unprototypical questions (which depart from it in several respects) and declarative counterparts of both types of interrogative sentences. The children performed significantly better on the prototypical variants of both constructions, even when both variants contained exactly the same lexical material, while adults showed prototypicality effects for LDD questions only. These results suggest that a general declarative complementation construction emerges quite late in development (after age 6), and that even adults rely on lexically specific templates for LDD questions.
This paper examines early syntactic development from a usage-based perspective, using transcripts of the spontaneous speech of two English-speaking children recorded at relatively dense intervals at ages 2;0 and 3;0. We focus primarily on the children's question constructions, in an effort to determine (i) what kinds of units they initially extract from the input (their size and degree of specificity/abstractness); (ii) what operations they must perform in order to construct novel utterances using these units; and (in) how the units and the operations change between the ages of two and three. In contrast to nativist theories of language development which suggest that children are working with abstract syntactic categories from an early point in development, we suggest that the data are better accounted for by the proposal that children begin with lexically specific phrases and gradually buildup a repertoire of increasingly abstract constructions.
This paper is much improved thanks to our interactions with them. In addition, we thank Ann Copestake, Dan Flickinger, and Gertjan van Noord for helpful suggestions. Finally, this research was conducted in part as part of CSLI's English Resource Grammar Online (ergo) project, in conjunction with the Verbmobil project. In that connection, we gratefully acknowledge. the support of the Bundesministerium fur Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung, und Technologie (bmbf). 1 In a feature-based analysis, such phenomena are elegantly assimilated to local subcategorization. If phrases bear feature specifications indicating whether or not they contain a gap and, if so, what kind of gap is missing from that phrase, then such information is locally accessible. Hence in just the same way that a word selects for some syntactic or semantic property of one of its arguments, it might select for an argument that is gap-free, an argument from which something has been extracted, or even for an argument containing a particular kind of gap. Yet feature-based extraction analyses, admirable for their precision and and comprehensiveness, have been less than fully satisfying. Specifically, work within Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar et al., 1985) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (e.g. Pollard and Sag, 1994; henceforth PS-94) has not yet been able to provide a unified account of extraction dependencies, relying instead on a number of unrelated mechanisms for complement, subject, and adverb extraction. For example, PS-94 (chap. 9) posit a lexical rule that removes an element from a word's comps
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This chapter highlights the effect of processing difficulty on acceptability. It analyses evidence demonstrating that parsing problems often reduce acceptability. It shows that the fact that processing difficulty may increase acceptability is less obvious, but this probability is nonetheless borne out. The preferred interpretation of a locally vague construction can have a positive influence on the global acceptability of a sentence even when this is later abandoned. The occurrence of the positive impact of local ambiguities in a domain that goes beyond mere syntactic feature differences is confirmed by the experiments focusing on long wh-movement. Thus, local acceptability perceptions during the parsing process influence the global acceptability of a sentence. © 2006 organization and editorial matter Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Féry, Ralf Vogel, and Matthias Schlesewsky, the chapters their various authors. All rights reserved.
Linguistics is supposed to be the study of linguistic competence. The sentences used by linguists to illustrate their arguments are presumably structures that can be generated by the rules that make up the native speaker's competence. Therefore, all normal native speakers should in principle be capable of processing them. In this study, adult respondents of various educational backgrounds were presented with a series of test sentences based on examples drawn from recent publications in the GB framework. The test was carefully designed to minimize the effects of extrinsic factors such as memory limitations and lapses of attention. It was found that performance increased dramatically with educational achievement, with the least-educated respondents consistently obtaining very low scores. An analysis of the patterns of answers given by respondents of various educational backgrounds revealed that the least-educated speakers were also the most likely to ignore syntactic cues and rely on nonlinguistic strategies in interpreting the test sentences. Thus, the results suggest that the ability to deal with the carefully edited, highly syntacticized structures that one encounters in publications dealing with language is acquired in the course of formal education and is far from universal. This in turn raises doubts about the traditional "logical" argument for innateness.
In this paper, two interesting predictions concerning the nature of parasitic gaps made by Chomsky (are investigated. Although the exact predictions are not borne out in Scandinavian languages, the results in each case confirm Chomsky’s claim that there are no specific rules in the grammar dealing with parasitic gaps but that their distribution follows from the interaction of principles of universal grammar and language-particular rules. It is proposed in the paper that resumptive pronouns license parasitic gaps in a language only if they behave syntactically as variables. The existence of parasitic subject gaps in Norwegian turns out to be a natural consequence, given that empty categories in subject position don’t show standard ECP effects in this language. In the final section, it is shown how a modified version of Kayne’s (connectedness condition can account for the distribution of empty categories in Swedish.
Goldberg overstates the differences between Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Construction Grammar. The former does not claim that a clause invariably inherits its profile from the verb; it has merely been suggested that the latter's preference for monosemy may have been pushed too far. The matter can only be addressed given a specific definition of what is meant in saying that a verb "has" a certain sense. Also, the schematic meanings proposed in Cognitive Grammar for basic grammatical notions do not imply a "reductionist" or "essentialist" view based on classical categorization. Instead they complement the characterization of these notions as "metageneralizations over construction-specific categories", which otherwise begs the question of why the distributional patterns supporting such generalizations should be observed in the first place.
In the last few years, there has been extensive investigation of the Empty Category Principle (ECP) — the requirement that an empty category must be properly governed. Attention has particularly focused on the ECP as a constraint on the representations resulting from Wh Movement (see for example Jaeggli (1980a), Chomsky (1981a), Kayne (1981a), Stowell (1981), Huang (1982)). In this article we will address such issues as (a) the definition of “proper government,” (b) the level(s) of representation to which the ECP applies, and (c) the relationship between the ECP and other principles. We will integrate this discussion into a treatment of Wh Movement in general and wh-in-situ in particular.
Generally, construction based approaches to grammar consider constructions to be pairings of form and meaning and thus as a kind of signs, not essentially distinct from words and other lexical items. Granting this commonality, Langacker (2005) criticizes other varieties of constructional approaches for using the notion 'grammatical form', and for not reducing the properties of grammar to the more fundamental and minimal notions of sound, meaning, and symbolic links between these two. While such a reduction is definitely worth pursuing, if only for reasons of general scientific interest, the abstract forms postulated in Cognitive Grammar (schematic sound patterns) are so general that they represent 'any sound', which threatens the very basis for the assumption that constructions are a kind of signs. I will argue that a usage-based view of sign-formation (Keller 1998), allows us to understand how the recognition of an element as belonging to a particular class of elementary signs can come to function as a signal for a specific linguistic environment (a construction), and produce a level of structure (categories of more elementary signs and relations between them) intermediate between sound and meaning that has its own (emergent) properties, which can still be reduced to more basic phenomena of processing and language use.
Recent work has ascribed the adverb effect, the reduction or elimination of the that-trace effect by the addition of an adverbial phrase, to an elaborated CP layer. However, additional observations about a variety of adverb effects with both positive and negative effects on acceptability, including some experimental data, suggest that (i) adverbs may undergo lexical adjunction to a complementizer and (ii) the CP layer may be contracting or folding in rather than expanding. This proposal facilitates explanation of an array of facts including the Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and other aspects of the behavior of complementizers in relative constructions and in complement constructions.
In the course of their history, English wh-relatives are known to have undergone a syntactic change in their prepositional usage: having originally occurred only with pied-piped prepositions, they came to admit preposition stranding as an alternative pattern. The present article presents an overview of this process, showing a modest beginning of stranding in Late Middle English, an increase in Early Modern English, and then a clear decrease in the written language of today, against a more liberal use in spoken English, standard as well as nonstandard. The drop in the incidence of stranding is thus not an expression of a genuine grammatical change but due to notions of correctness derived from the grammar of Latin and affecting written usage. The general trend of the development outlined is mirrored by relative that, with which the pied piping attested in Middle English completely disappeared from the language.
We examine a corpus of English oral narratives in order to explore the relation between intonation units (IUs) and grammatical units (GUs). IUs are almost always grammatical units (GUs) - the ''full GU condition'' but the mapping is not one-to-one. We examine what causes a GU to be broken across IUs and identify three major constraints: parallelism syntactic complexity in general, and distance. The converse of these principles, closeness and simplicity determines the assignment of two GUs to a single IU. We examine the consequences of our analysis for grammaticalization theory, which includes the evolution of syntactic closeness, and for construction grammar and related processing models, which relate syntactic simplicity inversely to token frequency. The propose the ''IU storage hypothesis'' to link together IUs, grammatical simplicity, and high token frequency.
Case in English is “dormant”—not valued or resolved in the syntax—unless it is “activated” by the EPP feature of T. Case-activated DPs move to Spec,TP for Case valuation. Further extraction (e.g., wh-movement) of subjects requires “phase-early” Case resolution, guaranteeing that the uninterpretable Case feature of a subject is resolved early, in Spec,TP, in compliance with the Earliness Principle. An inability to resolve an active Case feature early results in the C-t effect. The dormant “object” case form is determined at PF either by a rule of default case (accusative) or by one of a set of rules assigning a prestige (usually nominative) case. This system correctly predicts a variety of details of the C-t effect and the possible occurrence and distribution of prestige case forms (It is I or between you and I ) where Case is dormant. The C-t effect in Spanish, Russian, and Polish are also briefly considered.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Linguistic Inquiry. This article argues that inversion of the subject and auxiliary in English matrix questions and elsewhere is the effect of a violable optimality-theoretic constraint that requires head positions to be filled. When no other auxiliary is available, do-support occurs to satisfy this constraint, resulting in the presence of an expletive verb. When a higher-ranked constraint prohibits inversion, no inversion or do-support is found. The argument is then extended to cases where the complementizer that is obligatory, which are shown to offer best satisfaction of the proposed set of violable constraints.
As a consequence of the analysis proposed here, it appears that an element in COMP can have one of two things happen to it at S-structure. It may be deleted, provided that it is
\left[ {{*{20}c} \alpha & {WH} \\ {\alpha i} & {} \\ } \right]\left[ {\begin{array}{*{20}c} \alpha & {WH} \\ {\alpha i} & {} \\ \end{array} } \right]
, or it may fuse with another element, provided that one of the two elements is
\left[ {{*{20}c} \alpha & {WH} \\ {\alpha i} & {} \\ } \right]\left[ {\begin{array}{*{20}c} \alpha & {WH} \\ {\alpha i} & {} \\ \end{array} } \right]
. In the latter event, an
\left[ {{*{20}c} \alpha & {WH} \\ {\alpha i} & {} \\ } \right]\left[ {\begin{array}{*{20}c} \alpha & {WH} \\ {\alpha i} & {} \\ \end{array} } \right]
element also dictates the resultant form of fusion, with the consequences for the proper government of subject traces discussed above.While taking its inspiration from Pesetsky's rule of special deletion in COMP, fusion is distinct from it in applying also to Wh-questions and relative constructions where the resultant form in COMP is a Wh-phrase. Thus, three constructions, rather than two, involve fusion: Wh-questions, Wh-/that relatives, and in some languages and dialects, that-e constructions. To summarize in somewhat rough terms, a subject gap is licensed when a Wh-phrase may potentially appear in pre-subject position. When this is the case, either the [`(X)]\bar X
syntax. In retaining or acquiring an index, it permits appropriate proper government of subject position in both Wh-questions and relatives. In particular, it explains how a complementizer which is otherwise not indexed comes to behave like an indexed Wh-phrase. Further, FIC-T explains how for some languages and dialects the [–WH] complementizer may act as an indexed element and license a subject gap when the Wh-phrase corresponding to the gap is in a more remote position.This analysis has a number of advantages. For one thing, it allows a direct characterization of varying levels of acceptability among the constructions discussed above. It also separates the sometimes-accepted that-e constructions from the much more rarely accepted whether-e constructions. Second, it offers a concrete and general mechanism for explaining the apparent acquisition of head status by a Wh-phrase moved into a COMP already containing a natural
[ *20c + WH + COMP ]\left[ {\begin{array}{*{20}c} { + WH} \hfill \\ { + COMP} \hfill \\ \end{array} } \right]
head. Fusion thus offers an explicit account of how compliance with the requirement that a [+WH] COMP must have a [+WH] head takes place, while still allowing the [+WH] and [–WH] complementizers parallel status in phrase structure. Third, for English, fusion offers an account of what the resultant forms can be. In particular, it explains how Wh-phrases interact with complementizers and thus offers a more general account of the licensing of subject gaps while avoiding the complication of making that subject relatives exceptions (to the that-e filter) or requiring special rules which do no other work.
A well-known phenomenon in Swedish is that some adjectives are ‘defective’ in the sense that they are not possible in neuter
gender. In previous explanations, it has usually been argued that the defective forms could be distinguished from non-defective
forms by phonological and/or semantic criteria. Showing that such proposals cannot account for the data, I will argue that
the defective paradigms are caused by a number of phonological constraints which block morphological productivity not only
in defective forms, but also in many nondefective forms. Thus, contrary to what has traditionally been assumed, common patterns
of vowel shortening and dental assimilation in Swedish adjective paradigms are not the result of productivity, but the result
of a type of creative generalization where new formations require a sufficient degree of communicative need in order to be
perceived as grammatical.
KeywordsProductivity-Defectiveness-Transparency-Creativity-Constraints