Relativized Minimality

The phenomenon of “frozen scope” in double object and spray-load constructions is shown to hold robustly across contexts, constructions, and quantifier types. Nevertheless, frozen scope is not absolute, holding only between two objects but not between an object and a subject or an object and some other operator. The rigidity of two object quantifiers follows the pattern of multiple instances of movement cross linguistically (multiple wh-movement, multiple A-scrambling, multiple object shift): movement paths cross, recreating the hierarchical order of the moving elements (Richards 1997). Hypothesizing that quantifier scope is derived by quantifier-specific syntactic movement, movement that is constrained in the same way as other types of movement, permits these phenomena to be unified under accounts of Relativized Minimality effects generally.

Within the framework of featural Relativized Minimality, the present study investigates whether a Case mismatch between the relative head and the intervening subject ameliorates the performance on restrictive right–branching object relative clauses (ORCs) by neurotypical adult non–native speakers of Greek. Accuracy scores obtained from a sentence–picture matching task revealed that Case mismatch did not play a role in mitigating the difficulty in ORCs, but it did improve the time they needed to respond to the relevant questions. Since the same result was also observed in subject relative clauses (SRCs), it is claimed that non-native speakers might have been sensitive to overt Case marking, but this sensitivity was not strong enough to help them build the appropriate object dependency chain.

Большое изменение начинается с малого: Прономинальные клитики в тексте древнерусских летописей XII-XV. вв. Аннотация В противоположность западно-и южнославянским языкам, современные восточнославянские языки не имеют энклитических форм местоимений. Однако в древнерусском языке употреблялось широкий набор таких форм. Они вышли из употребления в конце древнерусского периода, в XV-XVI вв. В статье рассматривается употребление энклитических местоимений в тексте пяти летописей XII-XV. вв., взятых из НКРЯ. Анализ сосредоточивается на частотность употребления энклитических форм, на синтаксическую позицию энклитик, на устройство цепочек энклитик и на аномальные структуры. В статье предлагается взгляд, согласно которому исчезновение прономинальных энклитических местоимений является не самостоятельным, обособленным от других языковых изменений процессом, а «побочным явлением» значительного исторического преобразования, разрушения видо-временной системы и следовательного ослабления категории Т.

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

Purpose Relative clauses present a well-known processing asymmetry between object-extracted and subject-extracted dependencies across both typical and atypical populations. The present study aimed at exploring the comprehension of object and subject relative clauses as conceptualized by the Relativized Minimality framework in autistic children and in a group of age- and IQ-matched typically-developing children. The study also explored the way performance in relative clauses would be affected by the children’s language and executive function skills. Method Relative clause comprehension was tested through a sentence-picture matching task and language was tested with a receptive vocabulary task. Executive functions were assessed through backward digit recall and a Flanker test. Results Object relative clauses were harder to parse for both groups than subject relatives, while number mismatch between the moved object Noun Phrase and the intervening subject Noun Phrase in object relatives...

Results from a new grammaticality-judgment experiment in French confirm the published finding in English that sentences containing a Superiority violation involving a bare extracted element and a lexically restricted intervener (e.g., 'What did which student buy?'), a configuration termed inverse inclusion, are more acceptable than those involving a lexically restricted extracted element and a bare intervener (e.g., 'Which book did who buy'), a configuration termed inclusion. To account for this pattern, we adopt an explicit implementation of covert movement and propose some modifications in the characterization of the class of interveners. Interestingly, experimental findings on extraction from wh islands attest the opposite pattern: there, inclusion is more acceptable than inverse inclusion. We argue that whereas (overt) extraction from wh islands is sensitive to the feature content of the extractee and the intervener (i.e., whether or not they are lexically restricted), the degree of (un) acceptability of Superiority violations hinges on the different landing-site options that the features of the extractee and the intervener permit.

The extraction of a wh-element (extractee) across another wh-element (intervener) lowers acceptability: (1) *What i do you wonder who built __ i ? +Q +Q However, acceptability is reported to improve whenever the extractee is lexically restricted [1]: (2) ?Which building i do you wonder who built __ i ? +Q, +N +Q Featural Relativized Minimality (henceforth, fRM [2,3]) accounts for this improvement by stating that the local relation between an extracted element and its trace is disrupted by an intervening element as a function of the feature's overlap between the intervener and the extractee. Only morphosyntactic features triggering movement (e.g., +Q) enter in the calculation of the feature's overlap.

My dissertation investigates interference effects in the comprehension and production of long-distant dependencies in adults, integrating insights from theories on formal syntax and cognitive psychology granting a key role to similarity-based interference effects as a source of processing difficulty and/or ungrammaticality. My research mainly focuses on wh-islands' acceptability and attraction effects in agreement, which can both be taken as windows on interference effects in sentence processing. My research suggests that: (i) only similarity on a narrow class of syntactic features has the potential to generate ungrammaticality, while similarity in terms of other features increases processing difficulty without changing the grammatical status of the sentence; (ii) attraction effects can be conceived as the result of similarity-based interference; (iii) encoding interference plays a key role in generating processing difficulties; (iv) self-organised sentence processing models off...

Formal theories of grammar and traditional parsing models, insofar as they presuppose a categorical notion of grammar, face the challenge of accounting for gradient judgments of acceptability. This challenge is traditionally met by explaining gradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors, positing a purely categorical core for the language system. We present a new way of accounting for gradience in a self-organized sentence processing (SOSP) model, which generates structures with a continuous range of grammaticality values. We focus on islands, a family of syntactic domains out of which movement is generally prohibited. Islands are interesting because, although most linguistic theories treat them as fully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, experimental studies have revealed gradient patterns of acceptability and evidence for their interpretability. We report simulations in which SOSP largely respects island constraints, but in certain cases, consistent with empirical data, ...

Two acceptability judgment experiments were conducted to investigate the role of similarity in weak islands environments. We tested predictions stemming from a narrow ap-proach to similarity (Featural Relativized Minimality) and from a broad approach to similarity (Cue- based memory model) in generating intervention effects. According to Featural Relativized Minimality, only syntactic features triggering movement modulate similarity amongst elements, while according to the Cue- based memory model both syntactic and semantic features modulate similarity. Results show significant effects of both animacy and reversibility of thematic roles, two features that do not trigger movement. Therefore, our results support the broad approach to similarity.

Results from a new grammaticality-judgment experiment in French confirm the published finding in English that sentences containing a Superiority violation involving a bare extracted element and a lexically restricted intervener (e.g., 'What did which student buy?'), a configuration termed inverse inclusion, are more acceptable than those involving a lexically restricted extracted element and a bare intervener (e.g., 'Which book did who buy'), a configuration termed inclusion. To account for this pattern, we adopt an explicit implementation of covert movement and propose some modifications in the characterization of the class of interveners. Interestingly, experimental findings on extraction from wh islands attest the opposite pattern: there, inclusion is more acceptable than inverse inclusion. We argue that whereas (overt) extraction from wh islands is sensitive to the feature content of the extractee and the intervener (i.e., whether or not they are lexically restricted), the degree of (un) acceptability of Superiority violations hinges on the different landing-site options that the features of the extractee and the intervener permit.

Fig.1. Average d' accuracy (over subjects) as a function of processing times for conditions (a)-(d). Hit rates for (a)-(d) are scaled against the false alarm rates for the corresponding ungrammatical variants. Fig.2. Illustration of the non-monotonicity in the d' of 11 of the 15 subjects in the Bare Identity condition.

• general e ect of intervention in Extraction conditions as compared to No Extraction conditions; • maximal intervention e ect in Bare Identity and Inverse Inclusion, both more degraded than Inclusion. 2 However, (Featural) Relativized Minimality fails to account for the higher acceptability of Complex Identity as compared to the three other feature sets. The advantage of Complex identity may lie in the greater syntactic and semantic richness of lexically restricted whphrases as compared to bare wh-phrases. Building on content-addressable models of memory retrieval [4, 5], it is arguable that the extracted element has to be retrieved from memory. Similarity-based interference occurs when retrieval cues overlap with cues on other elements in memory. Lexical restriction of the two wh-phrases provides maximal syntactic and semantic information, therefore increasing distinctiveness between the wh-phrase to be retrieved and the intervening wh-phrase [ 6 ]. Future research is needed to characterize the exact nature of features entering into the similarity metric, and explore the possibility to enrich the memory-based explanation with the ne assumptions of formal syntax that have proven to capture the wider range of island phenomena in grammar.

According to Featural Relativized Minimality, the local relation between an extracted element and its trace is disrupted when it crosses an intervening element whose morphosyntactic featural specification matches the specification of the elements it separates. This approach naturally leads to a system able to capture degrees of deviance: the relative acceptability of an intervention configuration will vary as a function of the total, partial or zero featural overlap between the intervener and the target. In a nutshell, configurations involving a lesser degree of featural overlap should be more acceptable than sentences involving a higher degree of overlap. Three acceptability judgment experiments systematically investigated predictions ensuing from Featural Relativized Minimality in extraction from weak islands. Four configurations of feature overlap were systematically tested with different methods of data collection and on a large set of linguistically naïve participants. Results from the three experiments are highly consistent in returning that predictions from Featural Relativized Minimality are globally borne out, except for the configuration involving two lexically restricted wh-elements, for which tentative explanations in terms of grammar or processing are sketched out.

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

Autism Spectrum disorders have attracted the attention of many researchers working on communicative and pragmatic competence, but much less attention has been paid to the investigation of narrow syntax in this condition. On the other hand, in the field of acquisition, passive sentences (and related constructions) are known to be a late acquisition, and have been argued to be a case of late maturation. In this paper we report results on the comprehension of passive sentences in Persian-speaking children with typical development and with Autism Spectrum Disorders. In our findings, not all ASD children perform in the same way, rather those considered to be high-functioning perform like the typically developing, and the low-functioning have a clearly poorer performance. These results shed some light on former studies (Perovic et al. 2007, Terzi et al. 2014), with seemingly inconsistent results due to the fact that heterogeneous populations were tested.

Andrej A. Zaliznjak's recent book, Drevnerusskie ènklitiki, explains the need for a book about Old Russian enclitics by stating that while the enclitics of the South and West Slavic languages have attracted great interest, those of Old Russian have been largely ignored. Very little literature on the subject exists, and Zaliznjak cites only two studies, both dating from 1935: Gunnarsson's study of sę and Jakobson's small article about the Slavic enclitics as a whole. In Zaliznjak's opinion, this lack of interest has been caused by the absence of good sources for colloquial Old Russian speech, until the discovery of the Novgorod birch bark documents in 1951. The author also notes that histories of the Russian language do not contain chapters on the enclitics of Old Russian. Thus, the present study has the goal of providing the first modern, comprehensive study of Old Russian enclitics, in which the sources of Old Russian colloquial speech are fully taken into account. In addition to the author's use of the birch bark documents, he also makes extensive use of all the instances of direct speech, found in the Kievan letopis', since this also provides good evidence about colloquial uses of Old Russian. This book is intended as a complete and comprehensive expansion of the author's earlier 1993 article on the birch bark documents. It also draws from the author's 1985 book on the history of Slavic accentuation. The author makes the important statement that the goal of the book is not the comparison of Old Russian enclitics with those of other Indo-European languages or with the South and West Slavic languages. It appears that this statement was made for the purpose of explaining the absence of a discussion of the many recent studies of Slavic enclitics which have appeared in recent years, since it has become a topic of great interest to Slavists. At first glance, it seemed surprising that the references about Slavic enclitics are little more than the two 1935 sources mentioned above. One does not find such recent work as the Handbook of Slavic Clitics (Franks and King, 2000), or the large number of clitic references that one can find in their bibliography (pp. 377-392). One might have expected a bit more about the current literature on the subject, although Zaliznjak's position is understandable. After all, his book is the first to bring the enclitics of the birch bark documents and many other Old Russian manuscripts into the field of scholarly study. As the author mentions, the study of clitics has both phonological and syntactic aspects. Further, he states that "practically the only Old Russian manuscript from which one could directly extract information about enclitic accentuation" (p. 11) is the Čudov New Testament, due to the fact that it is accented. Therefore, in order to utilize the birch bark documents and other colloquial sources, it is necessary to use unaccented sources. Thus, accentological analysis plays only a secondary role, and the syntactic position of clitics is the main basis for judgements about their behavior. In fact, the central concept of this entire book is the explanation and prediction of those instances of Old Russian enclitics which do not conform to Wackernagel's Law, which specifies that enclitics must occupy the second position in a sentence. Therefore, every possible instance of a non-second place location of enclitics is analyzed by the author on the basis of many parameters, which constitute the chapters of this book. I will now give a brief account of the book's contents and how each chapter relates to the main theme of explaining how deviations from Wackernagel's Law might be explained. The first chapter, devoted to the main rules of enclitic behavior, introduces the most important concepts and parameters which are in constant use throughout the book. If one looks at enclitic order (i.e. "ranking"), the first five ranks of enclitics to occur-že, li, bo, ti (not the dative pronoun), and by-are considered to be the older and more stable group, and also can be called the "strong clitics" (p. 51). Conversely, the latter three ranks (dative pronouns mi, si, ti, accusative pronouns mę, sę, tę, and the copula) are the "weak clitics," although there is a descending scale of strength within each group.

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

In this article, we trace the diachronic phases of so-called genitive-dative syncretism in Old Bulgarian, a phenomenon which marks the beginning of the process of disintegration of the Case system in the history of Bulgarian. We base our research on a corpus study (comprising the texts of Codex Marianus, Codex Zographensis and Codex Suprasliensis) and we show, after a careful examination of the available syntactic positions for the Genitive and the Dative, that the main reason for the Dative shift in Old Bulgarian was the so-called External Possessive construction (also known as dativus sympatheticus) which allowed the dative to be interpreted outside the noun phrase but with reference to an inalienable possessive element inside the noun phrase. We discuss each stage of the functional reanalysis leading to the establishment of noun phrase internal dative possessives, and in particular the role of the emerging clitic pronouns and their second position syntactic behaviour as a main tr...

The paper discusses issues in the grammar of Case marking in the DP by focusing on two interrelated puzzles in the syntax of Bulgarian nominalizations. The first puzzle concerns the ban on strong pronouns to act as DP-internal subjects. We argue that this is due to a morphological Case conflict, and we also discuss some historical considerations bearing on the loss of the genitive in Bulgarian. The second puzzle we discuss concerns DPs headed by an object nominal which show no traces of a Case conflict. The paper offers some considerations bearing on the genitive-dative Case syncretism in the history of Bulgarian. * We dedicate this paper to Catherine Rudin, whom we admire very much as a linguist and as a person. We would like to thank Steven Franks for discussing various relevant issues with us and an anonymous reviewer for highly valuable comments, which have helped us improve the paper. For the requirements of the Italian academic system Iliyana Krapova takes responsibility for sections 1, 2, and 3 and Guglielmo Cinque for sections 4 and 5.

La hipótesis de la calidad y cantidad léxicas (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) postula que, en la medida en que el vocabulario se amplía y robustece, se facilita su recuperación y representación. El objetivo de este trabajo es pesquisar cómo se incorpora el léxico disciplinar en estudiantes novatos de Kinesiología. Para aquello, se aplicó una tarea de decisión léxica conformada por una prueba de vocabulario de alta frecuencia y otra, de palabras disciplinares a 55 estudiantes. Los resultados indican que las palabras disciplinares son de difícil reconocimiento, a pesar de los resultados arrojados por la prueba de palabras comunes.

This paper gives an account of inalienable possession (IP) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) that involves semantics and pragmatics, in addition to the expected morpho-syntactic factors. It argues that colloquial BPIP has moved away from the standard Romance pattern of manifesting IP via definite article, accompanied by a dative clitic under certain semantic conditions concerning the nature of the event. The data, consisting of narrative from two novels and a set of interviews with semi-literate subjects, are intended to represent both extremes and the midpoint of the formality continuum. The 3 corpora show the drift from a clitic-based syntax in the most conservative register to a nearly clitic-free situation at the colloquial extreme, where only prototype semantics reveals any codally relevant IP correlates. The link between possessor and possessum, co-designation, is shown to be inferential rather than syntactic, and satisfies the criteria for GRICE'S generalized conversational implicature.

En las últimas décadas se han realizado distintos estudios que sugieren que en el español hay una preferencia por la estrategia de cierre temprano o adjunción alta para resolver la interpretación de oraciones con cláusulas relativas con doble antecedente nominal. En este artículo, exponemos los resultados de una tarea de comprensión de oraciones en hablantes de español rioplatense. Todos los ítems experimentales presentaban ambigüedad estructural y manipulamos la posición de la cláusula relativa (en el sujeto y en el objeto). Analizamos el tipo de respuesta y el tiempo que tomaba decidir esa respuesta. Del análisis de ambas variables dependientes, se desprende una preferencia por la adjunción baja, que se vuelve más clara para las cláusulas relativas en posición de sujeto. Esto contradice resultados previos sobre el español, en particular para las relativas en posición de objeto. Discutimos distintos focos de variación y posibles explicaciones para las diferencias encontradas. Consideramos especialmente el impacto de factores metodológicos que no han sido contemplados en estudios previos.
Finalmente, proponemos interpretar los resultados a la luz de los modelos que proponen dos vías en paralelo durante el procesamiento oracional.

In this paper, we investigate focus intervention effects in Mandarin multiple wh-questions, showing that such effects arise only if a focus particle and its focus associate intervene between the interrogative complementizer C [Q] and one or more in-situ wh-phrases. We further show that focus intervention effects are not observed when a focus particle takes all the in-situ wh-phrases in its c-command domain as its focus associates. Adopting Pesetsky and Torrego's (2007) feature-sharing view of Agree, we propose that the dependency between C [Q] and an in-situ wh-phrase can be reduced to an Agree relation. In addition, adopting Rizzi's (2004) refined version of Relativized Minimality, we propose that focus intervention effects are induced by the presence of a Focus Phrase that prohibits C [Q] from establishing proper dependencies with the in-situ wh-phrases.

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

La hipótesis de la calidad y cantidad léxicas (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) postula que, en la medida en que el vocabulario se amplía y robustece, se facilita su recuperación y representación. El objetivo de este trabajo es pesquisar cómo se incorpora el léxico disciplinar en estudiantes novatos de Kinesiología. Para aquello, se aplicó una tarea de decisión léxica conformada por una prueba de vocabulario de alta frecuencia y otra, de palabras disciplinares a 55 estudiantes. Los resultados indican que las palabras disciplinares son de difícil reconocimiento, a pesar de los resultados arrojados por la prueba de palabras comunes.

Background and aims Language abilities vary greatly across children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In the present study, we investigate passive sentence comprehension, which has been underexplored among individuals with autism spectrum disorders and found to be delayed among other clinical populations. This study is the first to assess grammatical comprehension among Danish-speaking adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Methods Fifteen Danish-speaking adolescents with autism (mean age: 14.9 years; age range: 13–18 years) participated in a picture selection task assessing comprehension of passive sentences relative to active sentences. We compared our findings for adolescents with autism spectrum disorders to those of 15 typically developing Danish-speaking adolescents matched for age and nonverbal reasoning as measured by the Matrix subtest of the WISC-IV/WAIS-IV. We also analyzed associations between passive comprehension and nonverbal reasoning. Results The results sh...

This paper deals with a small set of data from clusters of three clitics in Spanish that questions the empirical adequacy and scope of previous analyses of clitic clusters in Romance. It is shown that the output of the Spurious se Rule is not identical to genuine se, at some level that is relevant for linearization of clitics within a cluster. A proposal is presented to capture the neglected data, and this is done in a way that illuminates the debate on the division of labour in clitic phenomena between phonology, morphology and syntax. Central questions in morphology, such as ordering of operations, syncretisms, linearization principles and consequences of lexical insertion are addressed and re-examined.

Children’s comprehension difficulties with object relative clauses (ORs) seem reduced when the embedded subject is a pronoun, rather than a lexical noun. The intervention locality account explains this facilitation in terms of a mismatch in features between the head of the OR and the intervening pronominal subject, namely the N feature according to some (Friedmann et al.  2009), or finer-grained phi features according to others (Bentea & Durrleman, 2021). We evaluate the predictions of these accounts in an experimental study assessing OR comprehension in French. Fifty-two children between the ages of four and five were tested on a character-selection task investigating whether intervention effects in ORs with a lexically-restricted object are alleviated, or not, with pronominal interveners matching with the object in other features than lexical restriction. We also explored the potential impact of an intervening pronominal mismatching with the object on a feature yet unexplored in F...

ABSTRACTThis study investigates effects of syntactic complexity operationalized in terms of movement, intervention, and noun phrase (NP) feature similarity in the development of Aʹ-dependencies in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old typically developing (TD) French children and children with autism spectrum disorder. Children completed an offline comprehension task testing eight syntactic structures classified in four levels of complexity: Level 0: no movement; Level 1: movement without (configurational) intervention; Level 2: movement with intervention from an element that is maximally different or featurally “disjoint” (mismatched in both lexical NP restriction and number); and Level 3: movement with intervention from an element similar in one feature or featurally “intersecting” (matched in lexical NP restriction, mismatched in number). The results show that syntactic complexity affects TD children across the three age groups, but also indicate developmental differences between these groups. ...

Discontinous dependencies are one of the hallmarks of human languages. The investigation of the locality constraints imposed on such long-distance dependencies is a core aspect of syntactic explanations. The aim of this work is to investigate locality constraints in object relative clauses adopting a theory-driven and quantitative point of view. Based on a comparison of the theoretically expected and the observed counts of features of object relative clauses, we study which set of features plays a role in the syntactic computation of locality (type, number, animacy). We find both effects predicted by a narrow and a broad view of intervention locality. For example, in Italian the feature number triggers a numerically stronger effect than in English, a prediction of the narrow, grammar-driven view of locality. We also find that the feature animacy plays a role in the frequency of object relative clauses, an effect predicted by a broader view of locality.

Despite their practical success and impressive performances, neural-network-based and distributed semantics techniques have often been criticized as they remain fundamentally opaque and difficult to interpret. In a vein similar to recent pieces of work investigating the linguistic abilities of these representations, we study another core, defining property of language: the property of long-distance dependencies. Human languages exhibit the ability to interpret discontinuous elements distant from each other in the string as if they were adjacent. This ability is blocked if a similar, but extraneous, element intervenes between the discontinuous components. We present results that show, under exhaustive and precise conditions, that one kind of word embeddings and the similarity spaces they define do not encode the properties of intervention similarity in long-distance dependencies, and that therefore they fail to represent this core linguistic notion.

Apologies for the duplication. This 2012 paper of mine was automatically recognized by academia.edu. A slightly edited version of this text is available as a chapter of my 2021 book А.В.Циммерлинг. От интегрального к аспективному. М.-Спб.: Нестор-История, 2021. ISBN 978-5-4469-1792-1. https://www.academia.edu/61854112/ .

The paper proposes a unified analysis of complex syntactic objects defined as clitic clusters. A cluster is by definition a string of elements {a,b,c...n} which can function independently without combining with each other but are arranged in a rigid order when they assume a contact position, so that for each pair (a, b) the linear order a > b, i. e. ‘a precedes b’ is fixed. Elements conforming to this definition are called clusterizing. Rules ordering language elements in clusters are called Template Rules.

The aim of this study was to examine the acquisition and processing of multiple who- and which-questions in Romanian that display ordering constraints and involve exhaustivity. Toward that aim, typically developing Romanian children (mean age 8.3) and adults participated in a self-paced listening experiment that simultaneously investigated online processing and offline comprehension of multiple wh-questions. The study manipulated the type of wh-phrase (who/which) and the order in which these elements appear (subject–object [SO]/object–subject [OS]). The response to the comprehension question could address the issue of exhaustivity because we measured whether participants used an exhaustive or a non-exhaustive response. Our findings reveal that both children and adults slow down when processing who- as compared to which-phrases, but only adults show an online sensitivity to ordering constraints in who-questions. Accuracy is higher with multiple who- than which-questions. The latter p...

Fig.1. Average d' accuracy (over subjects) as a function of processing times for conditions (a)-(d). Hit rates for (a)-(d) are scaled against the false alarm rates for the corresponding ungrammatical variants. Fig.2. Illustration of the non-monotonicity in the d' of 11 of the 15 subjects in the Bare Identity condition.

This study investigates the effect of featural mismatch in the processing of object relative clauses (ORCs). A self-paced reading experiment is reported in which the matching of formal and semantic number features of the head noun and the RC subject is manipulated. The predicted full mismatching intervention/interference effect was not obtained but collective nouns gave rise to the shortest reading times in both the subject and the RC verb regions. A follow-up suggests that it is subject-verb agreement in both the RC and the main clause that is vulnerable to semantic interference.

is the one who first opened my eyes and heart to research on language and language ability in all its forms, and she still does. Her passion and thinking have impressed me since the first day I met her. She supported me in my scientific and personal journey with her encouragement and understanding, even through its more confused and difficult moments. I am deeply indebted to her. Very special thanks also go to Luigi Rizzi, whose work and knowledge have been an invaluable source of inspiration. I am wholeheartedly grateful I had the chance to work with them for the ERC SynCart project and learn so much from them, including, above all, the beauty of wonder. Thanks to Giuliano Bocci, for always being willing to help, and for being supportive and encouraging from the first day to the last. I thank my PhD colleague, Giuseppe Samo, for the work we did together, for the moments of friendship we shared in this experience, and for constantly filling our office with cheer. I owe to the Syncart project and its members much of the good that is in this dissertation. Grazie! I want to thank Ur Shlonsky, who agreed to be my co-supervisor, Naama Friedmann and Laurie Tuller, who agreed to be members of the defense committee, and Christopher Laenzlinger, who agreed to be the president of the jury. Thank you so much. I thank all the members of the Department of Linguistics in the University of Geneva, whom I have missed a lot these last two years far away. I am deeply grateful I had the chance to share a piece of my life with such an extraordinary group. I also thank all the colleagues with whom I shared knowledge and fun at conferences, workshops, and summer and winter schools. When I decided to begin this journey, my supervisor told me 'You will see, this will be an enriching experience of inestimable value that you will carry with you in the future'. She was right. These five years have been undoubtedly very precious for my personal growth. Thanks to the flame that brought me to Geneva and all the way to where, and who, I am now. Thanks to my parents, Fabiola e Gianni, who once again pushed me beyond my doubts to embrace an unexpected amazing opportunity. Thanks to you and to Chiara, who never stopped to encourage me and rejoice with my achievements. Thanks to the enthusiasm I found in the first two years of my doctorate, which kept me engaged in this work with passion, energy, and fruitful curiosity, before the fear of not being up to the task made things less simple. Thank you Gregory, my husband, for always believing in me and loving me. Without your love, I simply wouldn't have managed to get here. Thank you Elia, my son, for the deep joy you have brought into my life every day in these last 20 months, and thank you for the happiness you showed also when I was working instead of being with you. Thank you Chanel, for finally making this possible. You were our angel. Thanks to Brisa, who, on day one, foresaw that three years would not have been enough for this work. Thanks to you for your companionship and to Matteo, Sara, and Teresa, irreplaceable friends in Geneva, Toronto, and anywhere I would be in the world. Thanks to Eleonora, Alice, Elena, Alessia, Marta, and Paola for all the times you offered your help and your friendship in this last part of this path. My gratitude towards all these people goes well beyond these words. Table of Contents List of Tables List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. Subject-object relative asymmetry 1.2. The featural Relativized Minimality approach 1.2.1. Not every feature matters 1.3. Alternatives to featural Relativized Minimality 1.4. Goals and outline of the dissertation Chapter 2: The lexical restriction feature 2.1. Introduction 2.2. The NP feature as an attractor of movement 2.3. Experimental evidence on the effect of NP on intervention 2.4. The studies 2.4.1. Experiment 1: Manipulating the nature and position of the subject in the elicited production of object relatives in Italian 2.4.1.1. Participants 2.4.1.2. Method and predictions 2.4.1.3. Coding 2.4.1.4. Results 2.4.1.5. Interim discussion 2.4.2. Experiment 2: Manipulating the nature of the subject in the elicited production of object relatives in French 2.4.2.1. Participants 2.4.2.2. Method and predictions 2.4.2.3. Coding 2.4.2.4. Results 2.4.2.5. Interim discussion 2.4.3. Experiment 3: Manipulating the nature of the subject in the comprehension of object relatives in French 2.4.3.1. Participants 2.4.3.2. Method and predictions 2.4.3.3. Coding 2.4.3.4. Results 2.4.3.5. Interim discussion 2.5. General discussion 2.6. Conclusions Chapter 3: The animacy feature 3.1. Introduction 3.2. Animacy and featural Relativized Minimality 3.3. Experimental evidence on animacy and object relatives 3.4. The studies 3.4.1. Experiment 4: Elicited production of relative clauses with an animacy mis/match in Italian 3.4.1.1. Participants 3.4.1.2. Method and predictions 3.4.1.3. Coding 3.4.1.4. Results 3.4.1.5. Interim discussion 3.4.2. Experiment 5: Elicited production of relative clauses with an animacy mis/match in French 3.

In this paper we assessed the effect of gender morphology on children's comprehension of object relatives in Hebrew and Italian. We compared headed object relative clauses in which the relative head (the moved object) and the intervening embedded subject have the same or different genders. The participants were 62 children aged 3;9-5;5, 31 speakers of Hebrew and 31 speakers of Italian. The comprehension of relative clauses was assessed using a sentence-picture matching task. The main result was that whereas gender mismatch sharply improved the comprehension of object relatives in Hebrew, it did not significantly affect comprehension in Italian. In line with our previous work (Friedmann et al., 2009), we propose that the children's problem in the comprehension of headed object relatives stems from the intervention of the embedded subject between the moved relative head and its trace. We ascribe the different behavior of children in Hebrew and in Italian to the different status of the gender feature in the two languages: in Hebrew, gender is part of the featural composition of the clausal inflectional head, hence it is part of the feature set attracting the subject, whereas in Italian, where tensed verbs are not inflected for gender, it is not. Under the assumption that intervention effects are amenable to the locality principle Relativized Minimality, it is expected that only features functioning as attractors for syntactic movement will enter into the computation of intervention. We thus account for the different effect of gender mismatch in object relative comprehension in the two developing systems. Thus, the main finding of this work is comparative in nature: there is no effect of gender per se; rather, the potential effect of gender is crucially modulated by the morphosyntactic status of the feature in each language.

Informal judgments of sentence acceptability have long been the primary source of evidence about grammaticality in syntax, and have been controversial just as long. In the past decade, there has been growing interest in collecting and analyzing acceptability judgments according to the formal protocols of experimental psycholinguistics, an approach sometimes called experimental syntax. This article reviews the major issues relevant to this approach, namely, the relative reliability, validity, sensitivity, and convenience of formal vs. informal methods.

Children’s difficulties with object relative (OR) clauses as compared to subject relative (SR) clauses have been explained in terms of intervention effects, arising in ORs when the object and the subject share a (lexical) NP feature (Adani 2011; Belletti 2014; Belletti & Guasti 2015; Bentea 2016; Bentea, Durrleman & Rizzi 2016; Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi 2009; a.o.). The gist of this proposal is that it is harder for children to assign the proper thematic roles to noun phrases in structures like (1) which involve movement of a lexically-restricted object (meaning a sequence such as ‘the + NP’) from its canonical position as complement of the verb to the beginning of the sentence1, while crossing a preverbal subject also containing a lexical restriction (i.e. +NP):

A robust finding from acquisition, adult processing and pathological populations is that object A’dependencies are harder to parse and comprehend than subject A’-dependencies (among others, Tavakolian 1981, Yoshinaga 1996, De Vincenzi et al. 1999, Avrutin 2000, Friedmann & Novogrodsky 2004 on acquisition; Hakes et al. 1976, Frauenfelder et al. 1980, King & Just 1991, Kuhn 1993, Schlesewsky et al. 2000, Gordon et al. 2004 on adult processing; Caramazza & Zurif 1976, Schwartz et al. 1980, Hickok & Avrutin 1996, Friedmann & Novogrodsky 2004, Grillo 2008, Garraffa & Grillo 2008, Friedmann et al. 2010 on pathology). The featural Relativized Minimality approach (henceforth, fRM, Rizzi 1990, 2004, Starke 2001) ascribes this asymmetry to the grammatical locality constraint bearing on intervention configurations (Friedmann et al. 2009). Under fRM, a movement relation between two elements X and Y is disrupted if an element Z structurally intervenes between X and Y and matches the specificatio...

Further steps Can we get rid of such cases? Could they simply be mistakes? No! Too frequent, too systematic… Are they metri causa? Maybe... But: "preventive censure" (Jakobson & Bogatyrev 1929) → inevitable premise: All attested data are grammatical / acceptable. Research questions: Is deviant placement arbitrary? Or can we identify recurrent patterns? If so, are these patterns related to the canonical placement? Götz Keydana Wackernagel enclitics in all the wrong places

• general e ect of intervention in Extraction conditions as compared to No Extraction conditions; • maximal intervention e ect in Bare Identity and Inverse Inclusion, both more degraded than Inclusion. 2 However, (Featural) Relativized Minimality fails to account for the higher acceptability of Complex Identity as compared to the three other feature sets. The advantage of Complex identity may lie in the greater syntactic and semantic richness of lexically restricted whphrases as compared to bare wh-phrases. Building on content-addressable models of memory retrieval [4, 5], it is arguable that the extracted element has to be retrieved from memory. Similarity-based interference occurs when retrieval cues overlap with cues on other elements in memory. Lexical restriction of the two wh-phrases provides maximal syntactic and semantic information, therefore increasing distinctiveness between the wh-phrase to be retrieved and the intervening wh-phrase [ 6 ]. Future research is needed to characterize the exact nature of features entering into the similarity metric, and explore the possibility to enrich the memory-based explanation with the ne assumptions of formal syntax that have proven to capture the wider range of island phenomena in grammar.

In (1a) we have a DP-subject gobernador ‘governor’ being modified by a AP-predicate idiota ‘idiot’. There is another construction in Spanish similar to a-QBNP, namely, the comparative qualitative binominal noun phrase (c-QBNP) (Español-Echevarría 1997, 1998; García and Méndez 2002; Casillas 2003; den Dikken 2006; Bartra and Villalba 2006; Villalba and Bartra-Kaufmann 2010; González-Rivera and Delicado-Cantero 2010), which displays the following syntactic structure: DefN/A de Def-N ‘Def-N/A of Def-N’ and, like a-QBNP, involves DP-internal predication. However, its meaning is different from a-QBNP’s. Consider, for instance, (2a). In this example the AP-predicate applies directly to the DP-subject.

Apologies for cross-posting. This 2011 paper of mine published in Issue 10 (17) in the "Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies" was automatically recognized by academia.edu. 
Статья содержит классификацию разновидностей скрэмблинга т.е. отношения нефиксированного порядка категорий предложения в славянских языках. Принимается точка зрения о том, что все виды скрэмблинга возникают в результате факультативных синтаксических перемещений. Для систем порядка слов и формальных грамматик, предназначенных для распознавания структур со скрэмблингом, релевантны как свойства конечных областей перемещения, так и свойства исходных областей. В славянских языках представлены все четыре возможных типа скрэмблинга полноударных элементов предложения. Впервые выделены диагностические признаки двух типов скрэмблинга клитик. The paper discusses the types of scrambling in the Slavic languages and in Universal Grammar. It is argued that all kinds of scrambling may be explained as instances of optional movement. Scrambling types are classified on the basis of final and initial movement domains in the clausal complex where sentence categories move. Slavic languages have all fourtheoretically possible scrambling types of non-clitic elements and both types available for clitic elements.

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form constraint that prohibits cliticization of a bound form onto another bound form, i.e. the combination of two bound forms does not result in a free form; hence it is blocked. The paper demonstrates that the use of ʔijjā and ʔijja in MSA and JA, respectively, is a direct consequence of this constraint, so that ʔijjā/ʔijja is a Phonetic-Form object used to serve as a lexical host of bound forms (cf. Fassi Fehri 1993). The use of ʔijjā/ʔijja is also shown to be prosodically ruled; it is prosodically dependent so that ʔijjā/ ʔijja should be a member of the prosodic unit which also includes the preceding word.

This paper is addressed the issues in Slavic clitic syntax, with focus on clausal-initial proclitic-enclitic sequences in Old Russian. • I argue that Early Old Russian in XI-XII centuries had a parameter setting licensing free clause-level accusative clitics including the reflexive marker ся and 1-3 p. clitic auxiliaries есмь, еси, есть, etc. after the clausal-initial conjunctions like и, a, нъ, да.