Complex NP Research Articles

An experimental investigation of <em>wh-</em>dependencies in four island types in Romanian

This paper gauges the acceptability of wh-extraction from four island types in Romanian, an understudied language in this respect. Linguistic theories predict wh-dependencies to be unacceptable when the gap is located inside adjuncts, complex NPs, embedded interrogative clauses, or subjects. After reviewing different theoretical approaches to island phenomena and experimental evidence from other Romance languages, we report on two acceptability judgment experiments, adapted from Sprouse et al.’s (2016) experiments for Italian. In order to test (conditional) adjunct, complex NP, and interrogative (whether) islands, the experiments crossed two factors: distance (between filler and gap, short vs. long) and construction (island vs. non-island). The investigation of subject islands required an alternative design for reasons specific to the structure of Romance languages. To test subject islands, we again followed the design used by Sprouse et al. (2016) and crossed the factors gap site (subject vs. object) and complexity (simple vs. complex). In line with predictions from most linguistic theories and the results from experimental work on Romance languages, we find significant island effects for each construction type. The subject island effect is weaker than the others, which may be an artifact of the alternative research design. Moreover, we discuss how our data from the adjunct and interrogative island item sets pattern in a somewhat unexpected manner. The present study provides initial experimental evidence for island sensitivity in Romanian bare wh-questions, which can serve as an empirical anchor for future investigations.

Phrasal frequency and literacy as predictors of individual differences in on-line processing and comprehension of English complex NP subject-verb agreement

We present experimental evidence suggesting that frequency and literacy predict online processing and comprehension of subject-verb agreement constructions by adult native speakers of English. We measured participants’ eye fixations, reaction times, and response accuracy in a forced-choice task using audio-visual eye-tracking paradigm. Participants completed a battery of tasks, inc. the Literacy Rating Scale (Tarone et al., Literacy and Second Language Oracy-Oxford Applied Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 2013), Agreement Judgement Task (e.g., Veenstra et al., Frontiers in Psychology 5:783, 2014). The AJT involved matching an auditorily presented subject phrase to one of two images of easily distinguishable colours presented on a computer screen (e.g., stars, circles). Participants heard 42 test sentences, counterbalanced across the three types: Type 1 (e.g., ‘The stars with the circles are blue’), Type 2 (e.g., ‘The star with the circles is blue’) and Type 3 (e.g., ‘The star with the circles are blue’*. Type 1 and Type 2 constructions are considerably more frequent in writing than in speech (Miller et al., Spontaneous spoken language: Syntax and discourse, Oxford University Press on Demand, 1998) with Type 2 producing more attraction errors (Bock et al., Cognitive Psychology 43:83–128, 2001; Becker, L., & Dąbrowska, E. (2020). Does experience with written language influence grammaticality intuitions? UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference: University of Birmingham [conference presentation].). Data were analysed with linear mixed effects models and generalised additive models. Results show lower literacy participants took longer to process sentential cues and made more attraction errors. These findings support usage-based research showing frequency and experience effects on online comprehension of canonical and non-canonical constructions (Farmer, T. A., Misyak, J. B., & Christiansen, M. H. (2012). Individual differences in sentence processing. In Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 353-364)., Street, Language Sciences 59:192–203, 2017), detection and production of agreement attraction errors (Becker, L., & Dąbrowska, E. (2020). Does experience with written language influence grammaticality intuitions? UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference: University of Birmingham [conference presentation].) and demonstrate how linguistic and attentional processes interact (Tomlin and Myachykov, Attention and salience, Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 2015). They also complement corpus-based studies by providing evidence that native speakers are sensitive to observed distributions (Miller et al., Spontaneous spoken language: Syntax and discourse, Oxford University Press on Demand, 1998).

Representation theorems for simplicial complexes and matroidal-like properties of minimal partitioners

A pairing on an arbitrary ground set Ω is a triple P:=(U,F,Λ), with U,Λ two sets and F:U×Ω⟶Λ a map. Several properties of pairings arise after considering the Moore set system MP and the abstract simplicial complex NP on Ω, defined by taking the maximum and the minimal elements of the equivalence collections with respect to a specific equivalence relation ≈P, respectively called minimal and maximum partitioners.In the present work we first detect various sufficient conditions allowing us to represent specific subfamilies of abstract simplicial complexes as the family of all the minimal partitioners of some pairing on the same ground set. Next, we classify two suitable subcollections of pairings by using generalized matroidal-like properties of NP. More in detail, we first determine a sufficient condition on P ensuring that the family NP is a closable finitary simplicial complex and call the resulting pairings attractive. On an arbitrary ground set Ω, attractiveness, together with a finiteness condition, implies that the minimal members of the equivalence collections of each X∈MP with respect to ≈P all have the same cardinality. Nevertheless, the converse does not hold, neither in the finite case. To this regard, we find some counterexamples inducing us to introduce the class of quasi-attractive pairings. We carried out a detailed analysis of quasi-attractive pairings: for instance we characterize them from a lattice-theoretic point of view and, on a finite ground set Ω, also in term of exchange properties of suitable set systems.Finally, by taking the adjacence matrix of a simple undirected graph G as a model of pairing, we show that the Petersen graph induces an attractive pairing, while the Erdös' friendship graphs induce a quasi-attractive, but not attractive, one.

Areas of Agrochemical Deepening Resulting from Long-Term Experiments with Fertilizers—Synthesis Following 20 Years of Annual and Stationary Fertilization

The paper hereby focuses on the essential field of soil evolution in relation to the effect of long-term fertilization on plant yields and the essential, evolutionary, and impactful changes in their fertility. NP fertilization (by application of ammonium nitrate and concentrated superphosphate) causes a change in soil reaction over time through acidification with increasing N doses, while phosphorus is able to partially mitigate this process. Acidic soil—the typical preluvosol—as a result of adsorbed acidity activation, solubilizes Al ions and may become interested in calcic amendment. Acidification tendencies are also maintained in the amended variants, but to a lesser extent due to the neutralizing capacity of the amendment and the presence of calcium ions. Complex NP fertilization in acid soil (preluvosol) cultivated with wheat can maintain a relatively constant humus content (%), but calcium amendment can cause a reduction of this indicator. In contrast, under maize, due to the effects of conventional tillage and intensive tillage, fertilization contributes to a reduction in this indicator, which is more active against the background of limestone amendment. The phenomenon can be explained by potentiation through the mineralization of the organic component of the soil. This effect is diminished in alluvial mollisol with a higher humus content, saturated in bases, and a buffering capacity. Organic and organo-mineral fertilization can control the modeling of soil humus content and its agrochemical status. The regime of essential elements (N, P, and K) becomes active in mobile forms, and the precarious supply conditions of the initial stage tend to improve. Applied superphosphate evolves, differentiated from the applied dose and pH, into non-occluded mineral forms (P-Al, P-Fe, and P-Ca), which supply the mobile forms in the soil solution for the plants, with the importance of maintaining, more of these forms at the level required by plants. In the case of potassium, the dynamics of its forms in the soil (unchangeable and exchangeable) control the soil supply state of this element and the effect of its application to plants. The data presented show that long-term experiments can effectively support the study of soil fertility through the soil-plant relationship.

Extraction from English RCs and Cross-Linguistic Similarities in the Environments That Facilitate Extraction

In the first two decades following Ross’s Constraints on Variables in Syntax, a picture emerged in which the Mainland Scandinavian (MS) languages appeared to systematically evade some of the locality constraints proposed by Ross, including the relative clause (RC) part of the complex NP constraint. The MS extraction patterns remain a topic of debate, but there is no consensus as to why extraction from RCs should be so degraded in English (compared to MS)—or why it should be so acceptable in MS (compared to English). We present experiment results which indicate that English should be counted among the languages that allow extraction from RCs in at least some environments. Our results suggest a negligible island effect for RCs in predicate nominal environments and a substantially reduced island effect for those in canonical existential environments. In addition, we show that the size of the island effect resulting from extraction from an RC under a transitive verb is substantially reduced when the transitive verb is used to make an indirect existential claim. We present arguments that patterns of RC sub-extraction discovered in Mainland Scandinavian languages are mirrored in English, and we highlight methodological innovations that we believe may be useful for further investigation into this and other topics.

Subjacency effects on overt <em>wh</em>-movement in <em>wh</em>-in-situ languages: Evidence for nominal structure

This paper investigates whether overt wh-movement in Korean, a wh-in-situ language, triggers Subjacency violations in the same set of bounding configurations as English. Yoon (2013) and Jung (2015) showed that Korean wh-islands display Subjacency effects, and we ask whether the Complex NP and Coordinate Structure Constraints are also observed. We find that they are not. We propose that this is because Korean nominal expressions need not project DP. Our analysis supports previous accounts of Korean nominal structure (Kim et al. 2010), which suggest (based on optionality of determiners) that “Korean NP structure is non-configurational or lacks the category D.”

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).

REPLY TO “LINGUISTIC MEANINGS MEET LINGUISTIC FORM”

Infiltration of a word’s meaning by world-knowledge is argued to be consistent with the semiological principle. While acknowledging variability in what people know about elephants, there is a common core of what everybody knows that we know we can evoke in anybody’s mind; this constitutes the meaning of the word “elephant”. Regarding truth-conditional semantics, to say that the difference between “dog” and canis familiaris “is not a semantic difference; it is not a difference in what they mean” is to equate meaning with truth-value. This would entail that the complex NP direct object in “I took the four-legged fur-bearing carnivorous animal that barks out for a walk” would have the same meaning as the noun “dog”. From a linguistic point of view, this is completely indefensible. My criticism that the truth-conditional approach erroneously takes sentences to be the basic sign/meaning unit is not obviated by the fact that truth-conditional semantics treats sentence meaning as compositional, the point being that sentences are clearly not pairings of sounds with meanings since they do not have stable meanings which could be paired off with their linguistic forms. This is argued to be the case even if one defines meaning as Logical Form.

Asymmetries in two types ofde-related verb-copying constructionsin Mandarin Chinese

AbstractThis article studies Chinese V-desentences from the perspective of verb-copying constructions (VCC) and presents some more evidence in favor of the distinction between descriptive V-deconstructions and resultative V-deconstructions. VCC with descriptive V-desentences (VCCD) and VCC with resultative V-desentences (VCCR) are linearly described as [NP1+ V1+ NP2 + V2 + de +XP]. Five asymmetries, though not very sharp, have been observed between VCCD and VCCR: (a) the movement asymmetry of [V1+NP2], (b) the questioning asymmetry betweenweishenme‘why’ andshenme‘what’, (c) the definiteness asymmetry of NP2, (d) the repetition asymmetry of V1, and (e) the asymmetry of subject-oriented adverbguyi‘intentionally’. To explain these differences, we assume that [V1+NP2] in VCCD is a constituent, acting as an internal topic. While similar analysis cannot be extended to VCCR. We propose instead that [NP1+V1+NP2] is a constituent in VCCR, projecting further into a complex NP and acting as a sentential subject. These structural differences can well explain the five asymmetries from the island effects, and the semantic and pragmatic constraints (on internal topics and subject-oriented adverbs). Meanwhile, based on the restriction of manner adverbial modification, the V2 in VCCD and VCCR is assumed to be externally merged at the morphological level via External Morphological Merger to satisfy the affixal properties ofde. The copying of V1 as V2 is not driven syntactically, but morphologically. This morphosyntactic approach to VCCD and VCCR provides a new perspective to explore V-desentences and VCC, which may shed light on the morphosyntactic studies of Mandarin Chinese from a crosslinguistic perspective.

Notes on the Resumptive Effect and the Skipping Effect

In this paper, we will suggest a new analysis of the resumptive effect and the skipping effect under the MERGE-based system in Chomsky (2019a, 2019b) and Chomsky et al. (2019). First, the resumptive effect can be observed in the cancellation of the Adjunct Condition and the Complex NP island, when a resumptive pronoun appears in the Adjunct clause and the Complex NP clause. Following Goto and Ishii (2020), we will show that the Determinacy principle can account for the resumptive effect with a resumptive pronoun in the Adjunct clause and the Complex NP clause. Especially, we will propose that the resumptive effect with the Agent Focus and the adverb effect in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language of Guatemala be accounted for by the Determinacy principle. Second, the skipping effect can be observed in the cancellation of the Subject Condition and the that-trace effect, when an expletive or adverb appears in the Spec of T. We will also show that the Determinacy principle can explain the skipping effect with an expletive or adverb in the Subject Condition and the that-trace effect.

Investigating the relationship between individual differences and island sensitivity

It is well-attested that native speakers tend to give low acceptability ratings to sentences that involve movement from within islands, yet the source of island effects remains an active debate. The grammatical account posits that island effects result from syntactic constraints on wh-movement, whereas the resource-limitation view posits that low ratings emerge due to processing-related constraints on the parser, such that islands themselves present processing bottlenecks. The current study addresses this debate by investigating the relationship between island sensitivity and individual differences in cognitive abilities, as it has been argued that the two views make distinct predictions regarding whether a relationship should hold. Building directly on Sprouse et al. (2012a), we tested 102 native English speakers on 4 island types (whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct islands) using an acceptability judgment task with wh-questions presented in context to quantify island sensitivity and three cognitive tasks to capture individual differences in working memory (via reading span and counting span task) and attentional control (via a number Stroop task). Our methodological approach takes into account several criticisms that have been made of Sprouse et al.’s (2012a; b) work, particularly the criticisms outlined in Hofmeister et al. (2012a; b). Our results reveal strong island sensitivity effects across all island types. However, individual differences in cognitive abilities do not strongly modulate island sensitivity. These results suggest that island effects emerge due to the existence of syntactic constraints and not because of processing difficulties, in line with the grammatical account.

Teaching the unlearnable: a training study of complexyes/noquestions

ABSTRACTA central question in language acquisition is how children master sentence types that they have seldom, if ever, heard. Here we report the findings of a pre-registered, randomised, single-blind intervention study designed to test the prediction that, for one such sentence type, complex questions (e.g.,Is the crocodile who’s hot eating?), children could combine schemas learned, on the basis of the input, for complex noun phrases (the [THING] who’s [PROPERTY]) and simple questions (Is [THING] [ACTION]ing?) to yield a complex-question schema (Is [the [THING] who’s [PROPERTY]] ACTIONing?). Children aged 4;2 to 6;8 (M= 5;6,SD= 7.7 months) were trained on simple questions (e.g.,Is the bird cleaning?) and either (Experimental group,N= 61) complex noun phrases (e.g.,the bird who’s sad) or (Control group,N= 61) matched simple noun phrases (e.g.,the sad bird). In general, the two groups did not differ on their ability to produce novel complex questions at test. However, the Experimental group did show (a) some evidence of generalising a particular complex NP schema (the [THING] who’s [PROPERTY]as opposed tothe [THING] that’s [PROPERTY]) from training to test, (b) a lower rate of auxiliary-doubling errors (e.g.,*Is the crocodile who’s hot is eating?), and (c) a greater ability to produce complex questions on the first test trial. We end by suggesting some different methods – specifically artificial language learning and syntactic priming – that could potentially be used to better test the present account.

Resolução de pronomes em posição de sujeito em orações completivas na retoma de antecedentes em SNs complexos: estudo comparativo entre Português Brasileiro e Português Europeu

In this study we tested, in EP and in BP, complement clauses with a null or an overt pronoun in subject position that is forced by number agreement to retrieve an antecedent within a complex subject NP in the main clause. With an eye-tracking while reading paradigm, we analysed the impact of structural position on pronoun resolution, investigating if the bias described for null-subject and overt-object pronoun resolution for null subject languages replicates for antecedents with different structural positions: null-NP1, the highest structural entity, and overt-NP2, the lowest structural entity. Moreover, we especially investigate the impact of structural position in BP, where c-command relations are considered to be of great relevance for null subject resolution. Results indicate that structural position impacts on pronoun resolution in the predicted way: null-highest NP, overt-lowest NP. Also, BP results reveal that, not only is the null form more constrained by c-command relations, preferentially referring to the c-commanding antecedent (NP1), but also that the overt pronoun does not show a clear bias also when considering structural position (as does not for syntactic function, as shown in previous studies).

The Role of Animacy and Structural Information in Relative Clause Attachment: Evidence From Chinese.

We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a rating task to examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information.

The mastery of verb agreement in French and its link to the complexity of NPs in students’ writing

This paper presents results related to subject-verb agreement errors made by 6th grade students (aged 10-11) and by 8th grade students (aged 13-14). Starting from the observation that 8th grade students do not perform better on verbal agreement than 6th grade students, we propose an explanation for the absence of a significant difference between the younger and the older students along the following line: the complexity of the syntactic contexts used by the two groups of students has a impact on verbal agreement. These contexts are: 1) the internal structure of subject NPs, and 2) the syntactic configuration. Our results show that the 8th grade students produce a greater proportion of complex subject NPs than the 6th grade students, and more constructions with a syntactic configuration and a complex NP. A mixed effects logistic regression indicates there is a significant effect of the NP type and of the agreement within the NP. Our study contributes to the studies relative to verb agreement in that it is based on data produced in an authentic writing situation. It also contributes to document and support the concept of syntactic maturity, which claims that older students use more complex syntactic structures than younger ones.

Subextraction in Japanese and subject-object symmetry

For a long time Japanese was taken to be a language lacking a subject-object asymmetry in subextraction. Two recent experimental studies have challenged this conclusion suggesting that Japanese complex NP (CNP) subjects are more opaque to subextraction than CNP objects (Jurka 2010; Jurka et al. 2011). Given the significance of this claim for the cross-linguistic landscape of subextraction phenomena, this study further explores the nature of subextraction phenomena in Japanese with three acceptability judgment experiments. We show that overt subextraction (scrambling) out of CNP subjects and objects results in similar acceptability ratings once the relative weight and order of constituents are properly controlled for. Recent experimental work which suggested that Japanese has a subject-object asymmetry to subextraction predicted that wh-in-situ adjuncts should lead to greater degradation for subextraction out of subjects as compared to subextraction out of objects. To test this prediction, we also present novel experimental data on wh-in-situ phrases inside subjects and objects in Japanese. Our results show that the argument/adjunct status of wh-in-situ phrases does not interact with the subject/object status of the CNPs, further invalidating the recent claims. Together these findings support the traditional view that Japanese has no subject-object asymmetry in subextraction, whether overt or covert. Having restored the status of Japanese as a language with no subject-object asymmetry in subextraction, we discuss possible reasons that could account for the absence of such an asymmetry. We suggest that the lack of asymmetry is due to Japanese subjects’ inability to satisfy the EPP on T/C; we further contend that cross-linguistic variation in subject transparency follows from whether or not the feature D comes from subjects.

L1 Interference in SLA: A Study on Turkish L2 Learners of English

This paper examines the role of L1 transfer in second language acquisition process. It aims to investigate if adult Turkish L2 learners of English make use of their L1 parameter values while dealing with the target subject-matter in L2 or not. It specifically focuses on four island constraints (Wh-island Constraint, Complex NP Island Constraint, Adjunct Island Constraint and Sentential Subject Constraint) in the target language. The data were collected through a grammaticality judgment test and a wh-question formation test from two learner groups (advanced, N:66; intermediate, N: 68) and a control group (N:58). The results of the study showed that the participants make use of the parameter values of the target language rather than leaning on the ones that their native language possesses. Their performance on the target subject-matter was rather similar that of the control group members. The argument & adjunct asymmetry that exists in their mother tongue was not observed in their L2 productions. These results show that their second language acquisition process is constrained directly by UG rather than indirectly through L1.

Fragment questions in Mandarin Chinese

AbstractThis paper argues that fragment question (FQ) in Mandarin Chinese is derived from topic movement and TP deletion, contributing to the growing body of evidence that sentence fragments are syntactically full clauses (Merchant 2004). Structurally, an FQ consists of a topic-like constituent followed by a particlene, which functions as a topic marker and as a constituent question particle simultaneously. The fragment is argued to move to the SpecTopP rather than SpecFocP (Wei 2013), because FQ exhibits topic properties and respects island effects such as the complex NP island and the adjunct island. However, it is insensitive to islands such as the sentential subject island and left branch condition. We propose that the absence of island effect can be attributed to the pied-piping of the entire topic-like island to the SpecTopP. In addition, the proposed analysis not only captures the ineligible FQs caused by intervention effect within the passive structures but also the eligible FQs induced by preposition drop in the language.

Investigating Variation in Island Effects: A Case Study of Norwegian Wh-Extraction.

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: whether-, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause (RC) islands. We found clear evidence of subject and adjunct island effects on wh-extraction. We failed to find evidence that Norwegians accept wh-extraction out of complex NPs and RCs. Our participants judged wh-extraction from complex NPs and RCs to be just as unacceptable as subject and adjunct island violations. The pattern of effects in Norwegian paralleled island effects that recent experimental work has documented in other languages like English and Italian (Sprouse et al. 2012; Sprouse et al. 2016). Norwegian judgments consistently differed from prior findings for one island type: whether-islands. Our results reveal that Norwegians exhibit significant inter-individual variation in their sensitivity to whether-island effects, with many participants exhibiting no sensitivity to whether-island violations whatsoever. We discuss the implications of our findings for universalist approaches to island constraints. We also suggest ways of reconciling our results with previous observations, and offer a systematic experimental framework in which future research can investigate factors that govern apparent island insensitivity.

Properties of complex ammonium nitrate-based fertilizers depending on the degree of phosphoric acid ammoniation

Complex ammonium nitrate-based NP and NPK fertilizers are multicomponent salt systems prone to high hygroscopicity, caking and explosive thermal decomposition. The slurries that used in the production of these fertilizers can also exhibit insufficient thermal stability. One of the most important issues for such slurries is their viscosity, which determines the energy costs for transportation and processing into the final product. Increasing the degree of phosphoric acid ammoniation helps to reduce the ammonium nitrate’s content in the product, but the main question remains about the properties of such fertilizers. This article is devoted to studying properties of complex NP and NPK ammonium nitrate-based fertilizers and their intermediates with increasing the degree of phosphoric acid ammoniation.