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A verb-frame frequency account of constraints on long-distance dependencies in English
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In: Prof. Gibson (2022)
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Abstract:
Going back to Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973), researchers have sought to understand what conditions permit long-distance dependencies in language, such as between the wh-word what and the verb bought in the sentence 'What did John think that Mary bought?'. In the present work, we attempt to understand why changing the main verb in wh-questions affects the acceptability of long-distance dependencies out of embedded clauses. In particular, it has been claimed that factive and manner-of-speaking verbs block such dependencies (e.g., 'What did John know/whisper that Mary bought?'), whereas verbs like think and believe allow them. Here we provide 3 acceptability judgment experiments of filler-gap constructions across embedded clauses to evaluate four types of accounts based on (1) discourse; (2) syntax; (3) semantics; and (4) our proposal related to verb-frame frequency. The patterns of acceptability are most simply explained by two factors: verb-frame frequency, such that dependencies with verbs that rarely take embedded clauses are less acceptable; and construction type, such that wh-questions and clefts are less acceptable than declaratives. We conclude that the low acceptability of filler-gap constructions formed by certain sentence complement verbs is due to infrequent linguistic exposure.
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URL: https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/138859.2
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2 |
Dependency locality as an explanatory principle for word order
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In: Prof. Levy (2022)
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3 |
Extraction from subjects: Differences in acceptability depend on the discourse function of the construction
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In: Prof. Gibson (2022)
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4 |
Syntactic dependencies correspond to word pairs with high mutual information
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In: Association for Computational Linguistics (2021)
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5 |
Word Order Predicts Cross‐Linguistic Differences in the Production of Redundant Color and Number Modifiers
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In: MIT web domain (2021)
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Communication efficiency of color naming across languages provides a new framework for the evolution of color terms
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In: PMC (2021)
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The Natural Stories corpus: a reading-time corpus of English texts containing rare syntactic constructions
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In: Springer Netherlands (2020)
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How Efficiency Shapes Human Language ; How Efficiency Shapes Human Language, TICS 2019
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In: Prof. Levy via Courtney Crummett (2019)
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9 |
Comprehenders model the nature of noise in the environment
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In: PMC (2019)
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Partial Truths: Adults Choose to Mention Agents and Patients in Proportion to Informativity, Even If It Doesn’t Fully Disambiguate the Message
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In: MIT Press (2019)
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11 |
Word Forms Are Structured for Efficient Use
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In: Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett (2018)
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12 |
Color naming across languages reflects color use
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In: National Academy of Sciences (2018)
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13 |
Tracking Colisteners’ Knowledge States During Language Comprehension
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In: Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett (2018)
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14 |
SNAP judgments: A small N acceptability paradigm (SNAP) for linguistic acceptability judgments: Online Appendices
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In: Language (2018)
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15 |
Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities
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In: Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett (2017)
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A meta-analysis of syntactic priming in language production
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In: Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett (2016)
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17 |
Wordform Similarity Increases With Semantic Similarity: An Analysis of 100 Languages
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In: Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett (2016)
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18 |
Processing temporal presuppositions: an event-related potential study
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In: Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett (2016)
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19 |
L2 processing as noisy channel language comprehension
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In: Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett (2016)
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20 |
Don’t Underestimate the Benefits of Being Misunderstood
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In: Prof. Gibson via Courtney Crummett (2016)
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