In a recent post (here),
I discussed a really nice result that our experimental syntacticians (ES) have
delivered wrt island phenomena. As I noted, they have shown that ES can find
(and has found) a distinctive super additivity signature of island violations
even in highly acceptable sentences in Scandinavian (i.e. independently of overall acceptability). This strongly challenges
(IMO debunks) the long held view that islands are parametric, a view that makes
little sense when viewed through the lens of the Poverty of Stimulus (PoS)
argument. Given that a well-formed PoS argument is virtually apodictic, this is
what we should have expected all along. Given ES tools, our expectations have
been realized. Chalk this one up as a victory for PoS logic.
I also remarked on another nice feature of this application
of ES methods; it has yielded a really novel result. We actually could not
“see” island effects using more conventional binary judgment (* vs ok) methods
and this misled syntacticians. In other words, opening one’s mind to the conceptually
impossible (i.e. “results” that violate PoS logic), encourages (a comfortable,
yet fraudulent) skepticism regarding our best-grounded insights (e.g. concerning
the universality of island effects) and this in turn leads research in the
wrong direction. Well-grounded results, like Ross’s islands should be fixed
points in ongoing inquiry and they cannot serve this function if GGers doubt
their standing. At any rate, hooray for Kush, Londahl, Sprouse and
Almeida. They have done something both
valuable and new.
I wanted to offer up two other results based on ES methods
that I believe are “novel” in the sense of being heretofore less easily
investigated without ES tools. I was
involved with two of these and so I know something about them. Hence what
follows has the whiff of self-promotion. Believe me when I tell you that my
contribution to both efforts was very minimal.
I invite readers to inform us of other new kinds of results using ES
methods.
The two I know about are both chapters in the book that Jon
Sprouse (with a small amount of help from moi) edited (here).
The first is the chapter by Johannes Jurka on subject islands in German. This paper examines these uisng ES methods.
It shows that extracting out of subjects is worse than extracting out of
objects and (this is the fun part) that
extracting out of non-agreeing specifiers lies midway between the two. Thus,
extracting out of specifiers is harder than doing so out of complements even in
the absence of much agreement or any evidence of displacement.[1]
This effect appears to be independent of freezing, which Jurka notes seems to
function as an independent factor. Indeed, extraction out of external arguments
is always harder/worse than extracting out of complements regardless of
movement or agreement. This is very much worth knowing for, if correct, it
suggests that subject islands cannot be reduced entirely to freezing effects. In fact, one can go a little further:
so far as I know there are not many current
theories (as opposed to Barriers style accounts that might be able to
accommodate this asymmetry via differential L/theta-marking) that predict that
extraction out of a specifier per se
should be harder than extraction out of a complement.[2]
Thus, Jurka’s ES empirical work suggests that we need to think quite a bit
harder about the subject side of CED effects.
The second paper is one that I co-authored with Brian Dillon
(again, he did most of the work). The paper presents ES evidence that what
islands are sensitive to is syntactic structure. “Opposed to what?”, you might be wondering.
Well, opposed to semantic structure in particular. There once was a time when
people tried to reduce island effects to semantic ones (I faintly recall Rodman
trying to do this in the early 80s). And given the close connection between
semantic hierarchical structure and syntactic hierarchical structure it is very
hard to tease apart whether island effects are actually syntactic. In fact, doing this requires holding the
semantics constant and manipulating only the syntactic form, and this is not
easy to do while keeping all other factors more or less the same. The above
paper does this by focusing on extraction form small clauses and their semantically
(largely) identical nominal counterparts. Thus pairs like (1a,b) mean the same
thing (both denote events with the same John/Mary participants) but it turns
out that extracting out of the nominal complement is harder than extracting out
of the small clause complement.
(1) a.
Mary heard John clumsily attempt to kiss Mary
b.
Mary heard John’s clumsy attempt to kiss Mary
There are, of course, all sorts of manipulations required on
this basic theme to control for all sorts of things (e.g. definiteness effects
among others (btw, Brian did this)), but the basic result is that extracting
out of nominal event denoting complements is harder than extracting out of
their small clause counterparts and this seems to be entirely due to the fact
that one is nominal and the other is not.
Again, many of the judgments are in the acceptabl-ish territory so we
have a kind of subliminal island effect. At any rate, to my knowledge this is
one of the first attempts to pin down the claim that islands are syntactic effects, i.e. effects
sensitive to syntactic structure. In
this particular case what matters is the distinction between a nominal and a
sentential complement (i.e. labels seem to make a difference here). If this is correct, then island effects are
syntactic phenomena at least in the sense that the relevant primitives need to
allude to the syntactic features of constituents.
Again, I mention these papers because they try to do
something new with ES methods, they try to find effects that are hard to spot
using the easier more convenient ask-your- next-door-neighbor methods. Let me
repeat, lest this be grossly misunderstood, that I am NOT endorsing the view
that we all now do ES experiments to ground our data. This is not necessary in
general (again as Sprouse and colleagues have argued successfully IMO).
However, there seem to be times when ES methods can yield new insights, and
when this is so, we should not be reluctant to use these (more expensive)
methods. When might this be?
I suspect that it is not an accident that ES has been most
successfully applied to island phenomena. Why? Because we know a hell of a lot
about islands, both empirically and theoretically. Much of this knowledge is
based on data collected in the standard way, and the conventional methods have
clearly proven to be very productive.
However, what the ESers have shown is that when we get down to more refined
and filigree issues especially in areas
that we know a lot about, it should not be surprising that we might need
more careful empirical probes.[3]
In fact, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, what we should find surprising is that
the very crude methods we have used till now have proven to be so robust and
subtle. This surely tells us something about FL, namely that it leaves very
deep footprints so that even slapdash methods suffice to probe it. However, we
should never have expected this charmed state of affairs to continue forever. Happily,
ES, which is pretty easy to deploy, provides another method for probing
structure. Happily it largely leads to the same results in the well-understood
cases. Happily, it sometimes delivers new insights. All in all, this is all a very happy fact.
So, be happy and be catholic in your choice of tools.
[1]
An interesting feature of Johannes’ results is that they provide an argument
for binary branching. How so? Well, IOs and DOs cannot both be complements
given his results. This should be possible were non-binary branching possible.
Though I believe that binary branching is in fact a condition on constituency,
there are not all that many arguments in its favor, so far as I know. There are
the Barss-Lasnik data, bit aside from that I don’t know of many others. Do you?
[2]
The one that I do know of (and that Jurka cites) is Uriagereka’s version of
multiple spell out, which, to my knowledge is not widely investigated or
accepted.
No comments:
Post a Comment