Acceptability Judgment Experiments Research Articles

A translation-matched, experimental comparison of three types of wh-island effects in Spanish and English

According to the historical empirical consensus in the field, wh-argument extraction from embedded wh-questions gives rise to island effects in English, but not in Spanish. This observation – which was important for the development of a parameters-based theory of cross-linguistic variation in islands – has recently been challenged by experimental studies showing wh-island effects in both languages. However, these studies typically employ different materials and experimental conditions between languages, limiting direct comparison. Our study addresses this limitation by testing wh-islands in both English and Spanish with translation-matched materials. We present twelve acceptability judgment experiments with approximately 100 participants per experiment. In each language, we examine wh-argument extraction from three wh-clause types (introduced by whether, why and when) under two matrix verb types (know and ask), amounting to six wh-islands that are relevant to assess the reported contrasts. We test (i) for the presence or absence of wh-island effects in the two languages, (ii) for a gradient contrast in effect size, and (iii) for evidence of increased individual variation in Spanish as compared to English. We find (i) that wh-island effects are present in both English and Spanish, (ii) that they are rather large in both languages and larger in Spanish for most wh-island types, and (iii) that Spanish does not show more individual variation in wh-island effects than English. Our results speak against the cross-linguistic contrast as originally proposed, suggesting that its use as evidence for theories that encode cross-linguistic variation in wh-island effects might need to be reconsidered.

Prenominal Adverbs, or Apparent Selectional Violations in Coordination

Abstract A robust generalization about coordinate structures is that X and Y may be conjoined in position P if and only if each of X and Y alone may occur in P. In particular, different grammatical categories (e.g., the NP a Republican and the AdjP proud of it) may be coordinated in a position that allows for either (e.g., Pat is [a Republican and proud of it]; Sag et al. 1985). Apparent violations of this generalization are sometimes taken as evidence for an asymmetric structure of coordination, where a single conjunct determines categorial features of the coordinate structure. Bruening and Al Khalaf 2020 and Bruening 2023 posit that one such violation involves coordination of AdvPs and AdjPs in prenominal positions that apparently do not allow for AdvPs alone; e.g., The [Once and Future] King (a book title) is grammatical, while the once king alone is claimed either to be ungrammatical or to involve a hypothetical compound once king that only a minority of English speakers accept. On the basis of rich attested data and acceptability judgment experiments, we demonstrate that adverbs such as once, now, soon, and twice combine with nouns in regular syntax, rather than via hypothetical compound forming processes. Hence, constructions exemplified by The Once and Future King do not violate the discussed generalization and do not provide an argument against the symmetric nature of coordination.

Short sources, islandhood, and pronominal correlates: New experimental support from German and Spanish for a short source approach to apparent exceptions to the clausemate condition on multiple sluicing

This paper focuses on multiple sluicing (MS) utterances in which the antecedent for sluicing is syntactically complex, insofar as it contains at least one embedded clause. Complex antecedent MS (henceforth caMS) is subject to the clausemate condition (CC). Phrased in sententialist terms, the CC bans sluiced wh-phrases from being base-generated in different finite clauses in the elliptic clause. Under specific conditions, it seems that the CC is obviated. We report results from acceptability judgment experiments on German and Spanish that provide further evidence that elliptic wh-clauses in caMS can be monoclausal in nature and that these monoclausal elliptic clauses (so-called short sources) are judged as significantly more acceptable than their isomorphic, biclausal elliptic clause counterparts. We interpret these results as supporting the view that purported obviations to CC are only apparent, following Cortés Rodríguez (2022a) and Cortés Rodríguez & Griffiths (to appear). Because these experiments are novel in that they focus on caMS configurations involving syntactic islands, their results provide new insights into how putative CC-obviation and islandhood interact and demonstrate that not only personal but also relative pronouns can function as correlates in MS.

Chinese topic constructions are derived by movement: evidence from acceptability judgment experiments

Abstract Chinese, a topic-prominent language, abounds with gapped and gapless topic constructions. Several explanations of how topics are derived have been proposed, which fall into three categories: the base-generation approach, the mixed approach and the movement approach. In this study, we conducted two experiments to examine the island sensitivity of topic constructions in Chinese, bringing novel evidence to adjudicate the different approaches to topicalization in this language. The results indicate that island effects can be detected in both gapped and gapless topic constructions, which supports the movement approach to topic constructions in Chinese, making influential hypotheses such as the topic licensing condition and the topic interpretation condition dubious. Our findings also provide new evidence for the influential proposal that Merge is applied freely (Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael Kenstowicz & Ken Hale (eds.), A life in language, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Chomsky, Noam. 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. In Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and beyond: The cartography of syntactic structures, 104–131. New York: Oxford University Press, Chomsky, Noam. 2008. On phases. In Robert Freidin, Carlos Otero & Maria Luisa Zubizarreta (eds.), Foundational issues in linguistic theory: Essays in honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, 133–166. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Chomsky, Noam. 2013. Problems of projection. Lingua 130. 33–49).

The Relevance of Unaccusativity to Possessive Datives

Abstract The possessive dative construction has been widely adopted as an unaccusativity diagnostic (Borer and Grodzinsky 1986). Gafter (2014) casts doubt on the relevance of unaccusativity to the acceptability of the construction. We ran a series of acceptability judgment experiments to investigate the validity of the possessive dative construction as an unaccusativity diagnostic, controlling for possible confounds such as animacy, definiteness, plausibility, lexical choice, type of possession and context salience. The experiments reveal that possessive datives are significantly more acceptable with unaccusative verbs than with unergatives, including reflexive and emission verbs. We conclude that unaccusatives, but not unergatives, are grammatical in the construction, and defend a structural account of the data.

An Empirical Investigation of Featural Similarity in Wh-islands

According to the most recent version of Relativized Minimality, the ungrammaticality of weak islands is the result of featural similarity between elements in an intervention configuration. The theory posits that only features triggering movement have the potential to induce intervention effects leading to ungrammaticality. However, recent advancements in the theory have extended the set of features claimed to generate intervention effects to encompass lexical restriction. This theoretical move encounters several empirical challenges. In this paper, we address this question in 3 acceptability judgment experiments in French. We explore how featural similarity influences acceptability judgments across both wh-islands and minimally different grammatical structures, that-clauses extraction, focusing on three distinct features: (i) the feature associated with question operators, (ii) lexical restriction, both anticipated to show intervention effects according to the most recent version of Relativized Minimality, and (iii) animacy, which is not expected to show such effects. Results indicate that featural similarity in lexical restriction and animacy exerts a mild influence on acceptability ratings in both islands and grammatical structures, contrary to what predicted by Relativized Minimality, while similarity in the feature associated with question operators exerts a strong influence. We propose an empirically motivated account that restricts the set of features relevant to grammar-based effects à la Relativized Minimality to core syntactic features triggering movement, and groups together the milder effects arising from similarity in other linguistic features, like lexical restriction and animacy, as resulting from similarity-based interference in memory.

Tense mismatches in Korean gapping and bare ko-coordination: an experimental study

Abstract Korean coordination allows non-final conjuncts to appear either without a tensed verb as in gapping (aka right-node-raising or right-peripheral ellipsis) or without a verbal tense morpheme as in bare ko-coordination. This study uses an acceptability judgment experiment designed to investigate whether tense mismatches degrade the acceptability of Korean gapping and bare ko-coordination with reference to full coordination. The experimental findings of the study indicate that tense-matched gapping is preferred over tense-mismatched gapping and that tense-matched bare ko-coordination is preferred over tense-mismatched bare ko-coordination. The results of the study also demonstrate that temporal order, whether it is sequential or reverse, does not affect the acceptability of Korean gapping and bare ko-coordination because tense-mismatched violations are symmetric so that they cause to affect all conjuncts. Overall, this study discusses how the phenomena of tense-mismatches are accounted for in full coordination, bare ko-coordination, and gapping. The tense-mismatches in these constructions are due to differences in conjunct size. The conjunct size is TP in full coordination (with two overt Ts) and bare-ko coordination (with a null T in the first conjunct and an overt T in the second conjunct), while it is vP in gapping (with an overt T in the second conjunct).

Agreement with disjoined subjects in Russian

This study investigates agreement patterns in sentences with disjoined subjects, focusing on cases in the Russian language where the disjuncts differ in person. Using acceptability judgment experiments, I analyzed how different agreement patterns are rated by native speakers. The findings confirm that the resolved agreement received the highest ratings, while third-person plural, third-person singular and closest disjunct agreement are also possible patterns. These results align with patterns seen in conjoined subjects but show additional complexities unique to disjoined constructions. The type of conjunction (coordinating ili ‘or’ vs. correlative ili … ili ‘either … or’) did not significantly affect agreement patterns. This may suggest that the semantics of disjunction has little influence on the choice of agreement patterns, despite the correlative conjunction typically indicates an exclusive disjunc¬tion. Future research should explore the effects of different word orders and disjunctions with first and second-person pronouns to clarify these findings further.

Deverbal psych nominals and nominative-accusative object case alternation in Japanese: an experimental study

Abstract Japanese psychological nouns (psych nouns) suki ‘like’ and kirai ‘dislike’ mark their objects with nominative or accusative case, but it is unclear what circumstances make accusative objects acceptable. Two acceptability judgment experiments manipulating object case, object animacy, and the psych nouns’ syntactic environment (copular, inchoative, relative clause) show significantly lower acceptability of accusative than nominative objects in copular and relative clauses, but no significant difference in inchoative clauses. A proposed account for these findings is that psych nouns can be nominalized VoicePs, in which case their projections contain external and event arguments and their objects are accusative-licensed, or nominalized VPs, in which case no external or event argument is available, and their objects are caseless and marked with nominative as the default case. The experiments also reveal a significant interaction between object animacy and case with suki ‘like’, suggesting the possibility that this is an emerging differential object-marking. (148)

Past and future time reference processing teased apart in Paiwan, an endangered Formosan language

AbstractHow the time reference of a sentence is processed based on the grammatical marking of the verb has already been explored in several languages with grammatical tense and aspect. It can also be grammatically expressed according to the reality status of the event (whether the event exists in time,realismood, or not,irrealis). This study reports results from an acceptability judgment experiment in Paiwan, a Formosan language which exhibits a realis-perfective/irrealis distinction. By placing realis-perfective and irrealis markers after deictic past or future time adverbs and manipulating the grammaticality of the sentences, we asked which temporal concord violation (i.e., realis-perfective or irrealis) was harder to detect. The temporal concord violation of the realis-perfective marker induced greater processing difficulties (interactions between time reference and mood marking revealed lower accuracy rates and longer reaction time), but not the irrealis marker, in line with previous hypotheses. These processing difficulties may be partly due to the Paiwan realis mood marker which also encodes perfective aspect meaning. The reanalysis of the design of previous studies indicates that the interaction with perfective aspect also led to additional processing cost, suggesting that perfective aspect marking plays a crucial role in the processing of time reference.

Phonological Well-Formedness Constraints in Mandarin Phonotactics: Evidence From Lexical Decision.

This article investigates the role of phonological well-formedness constraints in Mandarin speakers' phonotactic grammar and how they affect online speech processing. Mandarin non-words can be categorized into systematic gaps and accidental gaps, depending on whether they violate principled phonotactic constraints based on the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). Non-word acceptability judgment experiments have shown that systematic gaps received lower wordlikeness ratings than accidental gaps. Using a lexical decision task, this study found that systematic gaps were rejected significantly faster than accidental gaps, even after lexical statistics were taken into account. These findings thus provide converging evidence for the essential status of the OCP-based phonotactic constraints in Mandarin speakers' phonological knowledge.

Spread, stability, and sociolinguistic variation in multilingual practices: the case of Lánnang-uè and its derivational morphology

ABSTRACT This study examines nominal derivational affixes in a multilingual practice in the Philippines involving Hokkien, Tagalog, and English called Lánnang-uè. A feature of this practice is the systematic combination of affixes and roots (henceforth, ‘system’). Certain morphological combinations (e.g. Tagalog prefixes + English root) are used frequently and are regarded by Lánnang-uè users as well-formed, while others are not. This paper seeks to examine the spread, stability, and possible patterns of sociolinguistically-conditioned variation involving this system in the Lánnang-uè-speaking community. I conducted an acceptability judgment experiment involving 65 users in Manila and found high rates of spread and stability within my sample. Factors such as age, sex, and attitudes towards mixing selectively conditioned how some speakers adhered to system. For example, older users tended not to follow the affix source language, length, and position condition of the system whereas male users only tended not to follow the first condition. Based on the findings, I argue that the derivational affixation system exhibits conventionalisation, and that it emerged due to identity negotiation practices led by younger and female users. I also argue that conscious positive attitudes towards mixing help shape the stable development of multilingual practices.

A Paradigm Gap in Turkish

In this paper, we argue that Turkish has a gap in the third person plural cell of the person-number agreement paradigm of desiderative constructions formed with the -AsI suffix. We provide evidence for this claim from a corpus search and an acceptability judgment experiment. The corpus search shows that the third person plural suffix is virtually unattested with -AsI desideratives and the results of the experiment show that the third person plural suffix significantly reduces the acceptability of -AsI desideratives. In order to account for the observation that third person plural desideratives are unacceptable for most speakers, we argue that both negative evidence and competition accounts contribute to the existence and persistence of the gap. We discuss that competition accounts are supported by the presence of two competing forms whereas negative evidence accounts are supported by the anomalous relative frequency distribution in the paradigm of desideratives.

Island-sensitivity of two different interpretations of why in Chinese.

It has been assumed that the wh-element weishenme "why" in Chinese has two distinct interpretations: a reason reading, which typically yields yinwei "because"-answers, and a purpose reading, which typically triggers weile "in order to"-answers. It is claimed that the two interpretations differ in island sensitivity: the reason weishenme is sensitive to islands while the purpose weishenme is not. Assuming that the reason weishenme is a wh-adverb without finer internal structure, while the purpose weishenme is a wh-PP consisting of the preposition wei "for" and a wh-DP shenme "what," this contrast in island sensitivity can be considered as an instance of a broader generalization: the so-called argument-adjunct asymmetry (or the DP-adverb asymmetry) of wh-in-situ island sensitivity. However, recent experimental studies provided mixed findings on whether the argument-adjunct asymmetry of wh-in-situ island sensitivity actually holds. The current study focuses on the two interpretations of weishenme "why/for what" in Chinese, and provides evidence using a formal acceptability judgment experiment that the two weishenmes are both sensitive to islands, contrary to previous generalizations. Our results provide further empirical challenge to the so-called argument-adjunct asymmetry of wh-in-situ island sensitivity.

Remnant connectivity in pseudogapping: Experimental evidence for a direct generation approach

This paper reports the results of two acceptability judgment experiments that examine the effect of PP remnants with mismatching correlates in the antecedent clause (either a PP, with a distinct preposition, or an NP) on the acceptability of pseudogapping as well as non-elliptical controls. Across both experiments, three novel findings emerge: First, utterances with mismatching PPs across the ellipsis clause and its antecedent were consistently degraded relative to their preposition-matched counterparts. Second, this mismatch penalty arose for elliptical and non-elliptical variants alike with only minor differences between the two. Finally, a significant portion of the mismatch penalties was explained away by the degree of semantic similarity between the thematic relations established by the mismatching prepositions with respect to the antecedent verb which was measured in a separate norming experiment. We examine the consequences of these new empirical results for current theories of pseudogapping, namely (i) the remnant-raising analysis, according to which the remnant XP is raised leftward out of the VP prior to VP ellipsis, licensed under identity with its antecedent; and (ii) the direct generation analysis, under which auxiliaries are verbal proforms that recover their referent anaphorically without the need for remnant movement or syntactic identity between the verb and its antecedent. We conclude that the data are more naturally accounted for under the direct generation approach.

Extraction from Relative Clauses in Icelandic and Swedish: A Parallel Investigation

Extraction from relative clauses is generally taken to be unacceptable in Icelandic, unlike in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Recent studies on Mainland Scandinavian show that the type of dependency as well as the embedding predicate matters for the acceptability of such extractions, and the study of spontaneously produced examples has improved our ability to create felicitous extraction contexts. The studies of Icelandic extraction predate these findings, and there is to date no study which systematically compares parallel sentences in Icelandic and Mainland Scandinavian. This article presents such a study, using two acceptability judgment experiments, one in Icelandic and one in Swedish, drawing on newly gained insights about fronting conditions in the two languages to create plausible contexts. The Icelandic participants rated extraction from relative clauses as unnatural, with a very large acceptability cost compared to in situ versions and good fillers. Extraction from að-clauses received mixed ratings, and local fronting was rated on a par with the in situ versions. In Swedish, extraction from relative clauses was rated as natural a majority of the time. There was no extraction cost in local fronting, extraction from att-clauses, or extraction from relative clauses in existential sentences, while extraction with other embedding predicates incurred some cost. No differences relating to the embedding predicate were seen in Icelandic. The study corroborates the view that extraction from relative clauses is unacceptable in Icelandic.

The Puzzle of Argument Structure Mismatch in Gapping.

Voice mismatch between conjuncts is impossible in the gapping construction. Some recent studies explained this effect by analyzing gapping as involving the ellipsis of a category at least as large as VoiceP. One prediction this analysis makes is that mismatch of any head structurally lower than Voice (e.g., little v) should not be possible in gapping. In this study, through a series of acceptability judgment experiments examining argument structure mismatches in gapping, we provide empirical observations that challenge this prediction.

An experimental reassessment of complex NP islands with NP-scrambling in Japanese

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a noun complement headed by toyuu ‘that.say’ are islands for NP-scrambling dependencies. To explore this question, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments using the factorial definition of islands to test the status of noun complements, relative clauses (which are also complex NPs, and uniformly considered islands in the literature), and coordinated NP structures (which are also uniformly considered islands in the literature). Our first experiment yielded strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands (as expected), and strong evidence that noun complements are not. Our second experiment also found strong evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands, but yielded a small, non-significant, trend toward an effect with noun complements. Based on the sizes of our samples (89 and 90 participants, respectively), the sizes of the effects, and the details of the acceptability patterns, we conclude that noun complements in Japanese are not islands with respect to NP-scrambling. We also investigated between- and within-participant variability in our results. We observe no evidence of increased between-participant variability for noun complements relative to other islands, and no increase of within-participant variability for noun complements relative to scrambling out of (non-island) declarative CPs. Our results have consequences for a number of issues that have been encoded in current syntactic theories of island effects, including the correlation between syntactic constituent complexity and island status (e.g., number of bounding nodes or phase heads), and the correlation between complementizer deletion and island status (e.g., the complement/adjunct distinction).

Acceptance and Online Interpretation of "Gender-Neutral Pronouns": Performance Asymmetry by Chinese English as a Foreign Language Learners.

The present study (N = 109) set out to examine the role of cross-linguistic differences as a source of potential difficulty in the acceptance and online interpretation of the English singular they by Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners across two levels of second-language proficiency. Experiment 1 operationalized performance through an untimed acceptability judgment test and Experiment 2 through a self-paced reading task. Statistical analyses yielded an asymmetric pattern of results. Experiment 1 indicated that unlike native English speakers who generally accepted the singular they with all antecedent types, two Chinese EFL groups consisting of English majors (higher level) and non-English majors (lower level) both rated it as the least acceptable pronoun regardless of their proficiency level. In contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that like native English speakers, both Chinese EFL groups were not disrupted in their reading by the use of the singular they most of the time, although its online interpretation was modulated by L2 proficiency levels of the participants. While the English majors were not affected by the use of the singular they, the non-English majors spent a significantly longer time reading the latter region of the sentences where the singular they was used. In short, the results of the two experiments seem to indicate that under no time constraint, L2 speakers showed a heightened degree of grammar sensitivity, whereas when there was a time constraint, their grammatical sensitivity was reduced by a greater need to focus on meaning. The difficulty for Chinese EFL learners to acquire the singular they may be located at the restructuring of their existing knowledge of the plural feature of they [−PLURAL] in their mental lexicon and the adaptation to the sociocultural norms of the target language. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

Codeswitching and the Egyptian Arabic construct state

Abstract In this paper, I assume a grammatical approach to codeswitching (MacSwan, 2012), which predicts a ban on codeswitching below the head level. Previous literature has analyzed this ban largely at the word-level, terming it a ban on word-internal codeswitching. In this paper I argue that the said ban can also be extended from the lexical domain to certain syntactic domains that act as one word. I test MacSwan’s theory in the context of codeswitching within construct state nominals, a genitive construction prevalent in Semitic languages. The construct state is particularly relevant for discussions on the syntax-phonology interface within codeswitching because it is a complex and productive syntactic structure that is mapped onto one word. The results of an acceptability judgment experiment show lowered acceptability for sentences where a codeswitch occurred within a construct state nominal vs. sentences where the codeswitch occurred outside of a construct state nominal. The lowered acceptability for such codeswitched judgments suggests that the ban on word-internal codeswitching is not in fact limited to words but can be extended to complex syntactic units that prosodically function as one word.