Movement, islands and the ECP

Some papers reset the research agenda. This one by Lu and Yoshida (L&Y), I believe, is one of those (here is a slide conveying the basic point. The paper is under submission at LI and I assume it will be accepted and rapidly published (if not this is will tell us more about LI than it will about the quality of this paper)). The topic is the island status of Wh-in-situ (WIS) constructions in Chinese. The finding is that using judgment studies of the Sprouse experimental syntax (ES) variety provides evidence for two stunning conclusions: (i) that WISs respect islands and (ii) that there is no evidence for an argument/adjunct distinction wrt WISs. Both data points are theoretically pregnant and this post will largely concentrate on drawing out some of the implications. Many of these are mentioned in the paper (yup, I have a draft), so are not original with me. Let’s start.

L&Y is motivated by the premise that ES provides a useful tool for the refining linguistic judgments. The idea, as Sprouse has convincingly argued, is that grammatical complexity should induce a super-additivity effect in well-constructed judgment experiments (see, e.g. here and here for discussion and here for a nice review of the methodology). Importantly, super-additivity profiles arise in cases where less involved rating studies find nothing indicating un-grammaticality.

Before pressing on, let’s make an important and obvious point: all GGers distinguish (or should distinguish) acceptability from grammaticality. Acceptability is a probe for grammaticality. Acceptability is an observable property of utterances. Grammaticality is an abstract property of I-linguistic mental representations. Grammaticality is inferred from acceptability under the right conditions (given the right controls as realized by the appropriate minimal pairs). All of this is old hat, but a still very stylish and durable hat. 

Happily, for most of what we have done in GG, acceptability closely tracks grammaticality, but we also know that the two notions can and do diverge (see here for some discussion). ES is particularly useful for cases where this happens and the simple judgment elicitation procedure (e.g. ask a native speaker) indicates all is well. Diogo Almeida has dubbed cases of the latter “subliminal.” One of ES’s important contributions to syntax has been the discovery of such subliminal effects (SE), SEs being cases where ES procedures reveal super-additivity effects while more regular elicitation suggests grammaticality. So, for example, we now have many examples where standard elicitation has indicated that a certain dependency in a certain language shows no island sensitivity (i.e. the sentences are judged (highly) acceptable) while ES techniques indicate sensitivity to these same island effects (i.e. the relevant data display super-additivity effects).

We also find the converse: standard techniques indicating a profound difference in acceptability, while ES techniques showing nothing at all.[1]All in all then, ES has provided a useful additional kind of data, one that is often more sensitive to G structure than the quick and dirty (and largely accurate and hence very useful) standard judgment techniques, which sometimes fail to track these. 

So, back to the main point: L&Y is an ES study of WISs in Chinese and it has two important findings: that allWISs in Chinese exhibit relative clause island effects (henceforth RCI) (i.e. they alldisplay the super-additivity profile) and that there is no ES evidence that long “why” movement from an RCI is appreciably worse than long “why” movement absent an RCI (i.e. these cases when contrasted do not show a super-additvity profile). The first result argues that WISs are island sensitive and the second argues that there is no additional ECP effect distinguishing WISs like who/what from WISs like why. If correct, this is very big news, and, IMO, very welcome news. Let me say why.

First, as L&Y emphasizes, this result rules out most of the standard approaches to WIS constructions. In particular the result rules out two kinds of theories: (i) accounts that distinguish between overt movement vs covert movement (e.g. Huang’s) and treat island effects as effectively reflexes of overt movement (say, via a chain condition at SS) and (ii) theories that postulate two different kinds of operations (Movement vs Binding) to license WISs with movement subject to islands and binding exempt from them (as in, say, a Rizzi-Cinque approach to ECP effects). Both such kinds of theories will have problems with the apparent fact that WISs induce super-additivity effects.

It is worth noting, furthermore, that the sensitivity of WISs to islands is not the only example of apparent non-movement generated structures being island compliant. The same holds wrt resumptive pronoun (RP) constructions. These also appear to respect islands despite the absence of the main hallmark of movement (i.e. a gap in the “movement” site).[2]Both this RP data and now the WIS data point to the same conclusion: that island effects are notPF effects.[3]From my reading of the literature, this is the most popular current approach to islands and it has some terrifically interesting evidence in support (in particular the fact that some ellipsis (i.e. sluicing) obviates island violations). However, if L&Y are right, then we may have to rethink this assumption (see note 3 however).

Indeed, I would go further (and here it is NH speaking rather than L&Y). There have long been two general approaches to islands. 

First, we have Chomsky’s view of subjacency elaborated in ‘On wh movment’ that treats islands as reflecting bounds on the computational procedure. Island effects reflect the subjacency condition (aka PIC), which bounds the domain of computation (an idea motivated by the reasonable assumption that bounding a domain of computation makes doing computations more tractable).[4]

The second approach can be traced back to Ross’s thesis (islands restrict chopping rules) but has been developed as part of the linearization industry spurred by Kayne’s seminal work and mooted most explicitly by Uriagereka.[5]

The L&Y results argue pretty strongly, IMO, for Chomsky’s original conception precisely because they appear to hold whether or not the construction involves an obvious phonetic gap (gaps being problematic as they undo linearizations). If this is so, then it argues against linearization based approaches to the problem (leaving, of course a very big question: what to do about sluicing).[6]

We can go further still. The L&Y results also argue for a Merge only syntax. Here is what I mean. IMO, the central empirical thesis of the Minimalist Program (MP) is the Merge Hypothesis (MH). MH is the claim that the only specifically linguistic operation of FL is Merge. This entails that allG dependencies are merge mediated. The strong version of the thesis excludes operations like long distance Agree, which spans the same domains as I-merge but is a different operation. Note that it is natural to suppose that I-merge is movement and Agree is some kind of binding or feature sharing. At any rate, the classical conceptions gain empirical benefit from the “observation” that WISs do not display island effects. Why? Because, we might say, they are licensed by Agree not by I-merge and only the latter (being the MP analogue of movement) is subject to subjacency (or its current analogue). But as L&Y indicates this is precisely the wrong conclusion. WISs are subject to islands. A merge only syntax insists that all A’-dependencies are formed in the same way, via I-Merge, as this as the only way to establish any non-local grammatical dependency. So if WISs are G licensed, then they must be G licensed via I-merge and so will form a natural class with overt Wh movement. And this is what L&Y find. Both show super-additivity effects across islands. Thus, L&Y’s findings are what we should expect from a merge only syntax and it cautions against larding this best of MP theories with Agree/Probe-Goal titivations.[7]

We can milk a second important conclusion from L&Y. It solves a giant problem for MP. Which problem? The problem of unifying subjacency with the ECP. I have suggested elsewhere (see here) that the argument/adjunct asymmetries at the heart of the ECP are very MP problematic. This is so for a variety of reasons. The three that move me most are the fact that the ECP is a trace licensing condition and MP eschews traces, the huge theoretical redundancy between ECP and subjacency, and the “ugliness” of the basic technical machinery required to allow the ECP to track the argument/adjunct asymmetry. One of the nice implications of L&Y is that we need not worry about the problems that the ECP generates for MP because the theoretical apparatus is based on a mistaken description of the data. If L&Y is right, then there is no argument/adjunct asymmetry. Poof, the MP problem disappears and with it the ad-hoc theoretically unmotivated (within MP) technical apparatus required to track it.  

Of course, this overstates matters. It behooves us to go over the ECP data more carefully and see how to resolve the difference in acceptability that the standard literature identified. Why after all if all Whs are created equal do long distance adjuncts resist movement more fiercely than do long distance arguments?[8]L&Y offer a suggestion (no spoiler from me, read the squib when it comes out). But whatever the right answer is, it does not rest on making an invidiousgrammaticaldistinction between the two kinds of dependencies. And this is just what MP needs in order to start distinguishing ECP effects from the ECP theoretical apparatus in GB.

Let me hit this a bit harder. The ugliest parts of theories of A’-dependency within GB arise in response to argument/adjunct asymmetry effects. The technical machinery in Barriers (built on Lasnik and Saito foundations), though successful empirically (IMO, Lasnik and Saito’s theory was considerably more empirically effective than Barriers) had little of the virtual conceptual necessity MPers pine for. Nor were alternative theories (Generalized Binding, Connectedness) much prettier. Nonetheless, we put up with that stuff and developed it theoretically because it appeared to be empirically called for. The right aesthetic conclusion should have been (and actually was) that it was too contrived to be correct. L&Y provides courage for our aesthetic convictions. We should have judged these theories as suspect because ugly, though we would have been empirically premature in drawing that conclusion. Given L&Y, the facts are not what we took them to be despite reflecting very different acceptability profiles. 

There is a moral here, and you can all guess what it is but I cannot resist making it explicit anyhow. L&Y provide evidence for a methodological precept that we fail to respect enough: facts can change, no less than theory can. Or to put this another way: just as we can make theoretical wrong turns that we come to revise, we can adopt empirical generalizations that turn out to be misleading. The standard view is that data is hard and theory is fluffy and when the two clash it is best to revise the theory than rethink the data. L&Y provides a case where this is reversed. And I say hooray!

Let me make one more point and I will end this overly long post (long, and yet, filled with endlessly many loose ends). L&Y exemplifies something that I think is important. It is an empirical paper whose purpose is to directlytest a core theoretical assumption. This is not something that we generally see within syntax. Most papers are not out to test theoretical assumptions. Most papers use theory to explore more data. Theory might be tested but it is generally a by-product of better descriptive coverage. L&Y works differently. It starts from the theory and constructs an empirical intervention to probe it. Moreover, the question is quite precise and the assumptions required to answer it are clear within the confines of the project. This has all the look and smell of an honest to god experiment, a process whereby we query the theory using a relatively well-understood probe. Both empirical methods of exploration are worthwhile, but they are different and it is only relatively recently, I think, that we are seeing examples of the second experimental kind gaining traction. 

Curiously (perhaps), a feature of this second kind of paper is that the paper is short. L&Y is a squib. Empirical explorations in linguistics often read like novellas. L&Y is very definitely a very very short story. I would like to suggest that experimental papers like L&Y reflect the scientific health of linguistics. It is now possible to ask a sharp question, and give a sharp answer. We need more of these kinds of short pointed experimental forays into the data starting from well-formulated theoretical starting points.

That’s it. I have gone on far too long. L&Y is terrific. If correct, it is very important. I personally hope the results stand up. It would go a long way to cleaning up a particularly untidy part of syntactic theory and thereby further vindicating the promise of MP, indeed a particularly strong version of MP, one that endorses a Merge only conception of grammar.

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[1]ES techniques have, for example, suggested that adjunct island effects might not be of a piece with other islands as they (often) fail to display super-additivity effects.

[2]To be slightly more careful and squinting at the ES results wrt resumptives the following is more accurate: resumptives uniformly ameliorate fixed subject constraint violations but note “mere” subjacency violations. Thus, resumptives inside islands seem to show the same super-additvity profiles as their moved counterparts.

[3]Perhaps a more felicitous way of putting matters is that RPs and WISs are also products of I-merge and so expected to be subject to islands. One reason for treating islands as PF effects is to capture the distinctionbetween these cases and more conventional examples of overt movement. If, however, they pattern the same then the motivation for treating islands as PF effects weakens. This said, I am pretty sure it is possible to model these cases as formed via movement/I-merge by, for example, treating them as cases of remnant movement, the moved Wh or Q morpheme starts as part of a doubled structure including the RP or WIS. 

[4]See Chomsky’s ‘On wh movement’ for discussion. See herefor more prose.

[5]Versions of this original idea were developed by many people including Hornstein, Lasnik and Uriagereka, and Fox and Pesetsky. The idea centers on the idea that the problem with movement is that it reorders elements and so can come into conflict with the ordering algorithm. In this sense, gaps are a big deal and what distinguish movement from other kinds of long distance dependencies like binding.

[6]Or again, it argues for treating the operation (e.g. movement) as in need of constraint rather than the output of the operation (a gap, or new linear order). What plausibly unifies cases of “overt” WH (as in English), “covert” WH (as in Chinese) and resumptive WH (as in Hebrew) is that they all involve relating an A’ element to a non-local syntactic position that can be arbitrarily far away. IT’s the span that seems to matter, not what sits at the tail of the chain.

[7]RP constructions must also be formed via I-merge and so too all forms of binding. This requirement fits well with the observation that RPs obey islands. Binding, especially pronominal binding, is likely to be more problematic. As they say at this point in a journal paper in reply to referee 2; these are topics for further research.

[8]As I have noted in other places, this description of the ECP contrast is not quite correct, as we have known since Rizzi’s work on minimality. The distinction seems less a matter of argument vs adjunct than object centered vs non object centered quantification. But this is a topic for another time.

Islands are not parametric

Every now and then the world works exactly the way our best reasoning (and theory) says it is supposed to work. Pauli (whose proposal was en-theoried by Fermi) postulates the neutrino to save the laws of conservation and momentum in the face of troubling data from beta decay (see here) and 20 years later the little rascalino is detected and 40 years later Nobel prizes are collected. Ditto for the Higgs field, but this time the lag was over 40 years from theory to detection, and again a Nobel for the effort. These are considered some of the great moments in science for they are times when theory insisted that the world was a certain way despite apparent counter-evidence, and patience plus experimental ingenuity proved theory right. In other words, we love these cases for they comes as close as we can hope to get to having proof that we understand something about the world.

Now linguistics (I am almost embarrassed to say this, but I really don’t want to be painted as hyperbolic) is not quantum mechanics. It’s not even Newtonian mechanics (if only!). But every now and then we can snag a glimpse of FL by considering how its theories, and the logic that allows us to develop these, yield unexpected validation of its core tenets. The logic I refer to in this case is the PoS. Many denigrate its value. Many are suspicious of its claims and dispirited by its crude reasoning. They are wrong. Today I want to point to one of its big success stories.  And I want to luxuriate in the details so that the wonders of PoS thinking shine clearly through.

The Athens participants, to a person, touted islands effects as one of GG’s great discoveries. It is such for several reasons.

First, they are non-obvious in the simple sense that the fact that islands exist is not cullable from inspection of live text. Listen all you want to the speech around you and you will nary spot an island. It is the classic example of a dog that doesn’t bark. It is only when you ask informants about extractions that the distinctive properties of structures as islands shines through.

Second, it takes quite a bit of technical apparatus to even describe an island. No conception of phrasal structure, no islands. No understanding of movement as a transformation of a certain sort, no islands. So, the very fact that islands are linguistic objects with their own distinctive properties only becomes evident when the methods and tools of GG become available.

Third, and IMO the most important point, islands are perfect probes into the structure of FL and were among the first linguistic objects to tell us anything about its structure. Why are they perfect probes? Because if islands exist (and they do, they do) then their existence must be grounded in the structure of FL. Let me say this very important point another way: the fact that there are islands cannot be something that is learned (in the simple sense learning as induction from the ambient linguistic data). That islands exist and constrain movement operations cannot possibly be learned because there is no data to learn this from in the PLD. Indeed, absent inquiries by pesky linguists interested in islands, there would be virtually no data at all concerning their islandish properties, neither in the PLD nor the positive LD.  Island data must be manufactured by hard working linguists to be seeable at all. Thus, island phenomena are the quintessential examples of linguists acting like real scientists: they are unobvious, based on factitious data, only describable against a pretty sophisticated technical background and pregnant with implication for the fine structure of the principle object of inquiry, FL.  Wow!! So islands are a really, really, really big deal.

And this sets up why this poster by Dave Kush, Terje Lohndal and Jon Sprouse (KLS) is so exciting. As the third point above notes, what makes islands so exciting is that they are the perfect probes into the structure of FL precisely because whatever properties they have cannot possibly be learned and so must reflect the native structure of FL. To repeat, there exists no data relevant to identifying islands and their properties in either the PLD or the positive LD. But this absence of data implies that island effects should not vary across Gs. Why? Because variation is a function of FL’s response to differential data input and if there is no plausible data input relevant to islands then there cannot be variation. However, for many years now, it has been argued that different Gs invidiously distinguish among the islands. In particular, since the early 1980s several have argued that the Scandinavian languages don’t have islands. KLS shows that this is simply incorrect. Here’s how it shows this.

The argument that Scandinavian Gs are not subject to islands rests on the claim that they do not display island effects. What are island effects? These are the native speaker judgments which categorize extractions out of islands as unacceptable. Thus, a native speaker of English will typically judge (1) as garbage, this being typically annotated with a “*”.

(1)  *What did the nominee hear the rumor that Jon got

In contrast to this judgment concerning (1) in English, the claim has been that speakers of Swedish and Norwegian accept such sentences and do not give them *s. Maybe they give them at most a ?, but never a *. So the basis for the claim that Scandinavian Gs are exempt from islands is that native speakers do not find them unacceptable. The conclusion that has been drawn is that Gs vary wrt to islands. But this is impossible given PoS reasoning that implies that Gs could never so vary, ever. As you can see, there is an impasse here: theory says no variation, empirics say there is. Not surprisingly, given the low value much of the field assigns to PoS style theoretical “speculation” (aka logic), much of the field has concluded that there is something deeply wrong about our theory of islands. [1]  

Now for a long time this is how things sat. The obvious answer to this empirical challenge is to deny that Scandinavian acceptability judgments are good indicators of grammaticality wrt Scandinavian islands. In other words, the fact that Scandinavian speakers accept movement out of Scandinavian islands does not imply that the structures so derived are grammatical. More pithily, in this particular case (un)acceptability poorly tracks (un)grammaticality.

Let me quickly say two things about this general point before proceeding lest too big a moral gets drawn. First, it is important to remember that within GG, conceptually speaking, “ungrammatical” is not a synonym for “unacceptable,” despite the practice within linguistics of confusing them (especially terminologically).  “Acceptable” is a descriptive predicate of data points, a report of speaker judgments. “Grammatical” is a theoretical predicate applied to G constructs. GGers have been lucky in that over a large domain of data the two notions coincide. In other words, often, (un)acceptability is a good indicator of (un)grammaticality. However, one obvious way of dissolving the Scandinavian counter-examples above is to suggest that the link between the two is looser in this particular case. In other words, that the English data is more revealing of the underlying G facts than is the Scandinavian data in this case.

Second, the fact that this may be so in this case does NOT mean that acceptability is always or generally or usually a bad indicator of grammaticality. It isn’t. First, as Sprouse and Almeida and Schutze have demonstrated in their various papers, over a large and impressive range of data, the quick and dirty acceptability judgment data is a very stable and reliable kind of data.[2] Second, cross-linguistic research over the last 60 years has shown that the MLGs discovered in one language using acceptability data in that language generally map quite well onto the acceptability data gathered in other languages for the same constructions. In fact, what made the Scandinavian data intriguing is that it was somewhat of an outlier. Many many languages (most?) exhibit English style island effects. So, even if the assumption that acceptability tracks grammaticality might not be perfectly correct, it is roughly so and thus it is prima facie reasonable to take it to be a faithful indicator of grammaticality ceteris paribus.[3]

Ok, back to KLS. How does it redeem the PoS view of islands? Well, it provides a method for detecting island effects independently of binary (i.e. ok vs *) acceptability judgments. The probe comes from a battery of relative acceptability data gathered using the now well-known techniques of Experimental Syntax (ES). ES does acceptability judgment gathering more carefully than we tend to do. Factors are separated out (distance vs island) and their interaction (more) carefully compared. Using this technique one can gather relative acceptability data even among sentences all of which are judged quite acceptable. Using this method, the empirical signature of ungrammaticality is a super additivity (SA) profile apparent when you cross distance and structure.[4]

With this machinery in place, we are ready for KLS’s big find. KLS applies this SA probe to English and Scandinavian and shows that both languages display a SA profile for sentences involving extraction from islands.[5] Where the languages differ then is not in being responsive to islands but in how speakers map an island violation into a binary good/bad judgment. English speakers judge island violations as bad and Scandinavian speakers often judge them as ok.[6]

Conclusion: Scandinavian obeys islands restrictions and this is visible when we use a more sensitive measure of G structure than ok vs *. In other words we clearly see the effects of islands in Scandinavian when we look at their SA profiles. 

We should all rejoice here. This is great. The PoS reasoning we outlined above is vindicated. Gs do not differ wrt their obeisance to island restrictions and these are still excellent probes into the structure of FL. I, of course, am not at all surprised. The logic behind the PoS is impeccable. I have the irrational belief that if something is logically impossible then it is also metaphysically impossible. Thus, if some G difference cannot be  learned due to an absence of any possibly relevant data, all Gs must be the same. This is as close to apodictic reasoning as we are likely to find in the non-mathematical sciences, so I have always assumed that the KLS results (or some other indication that Scandinavian obeys islands) must exist. That said, who can’t delight when logic proves efficacious? I know I can’t!

However, KLS is actually even more interesting than this. It not only vindicates the logic of the GG program against a long-standing apparent problem, but it also reshapes the domain of inquiry. How? Well, note that English and Scandinavian still differ despite the fact that both show island effects. After all, the former assign *s to sentences that the latter assign at most ?s to. Why? What’s going on? KLS offers some speculations worth investigating regarding how non-syntactic conditions might affect overall (i.e. binary) acceptability judgments.[7] I personally suspect that this overall measure is affected by many different factors including intonation (and hence old/new info structure) lexical differentiation and a host of other things that I really can’t imagine. Sorting this out will be hard if for no other reason that we have not really concentrated much on how these myriad effects interact to provide an overall judgment. What KLS shows is that if we are interested in how speakers construct an overall judgment (and, off hand, it is not clear to me that we should be interested in this but I am happy to hear arguments for why we would be), then this is where you need to look for “variation.” Why? Because they have provided very good evidence that islands are NOT parameterized, which is the conclusion that elementary PoS reasoning leads to.

Diogo Almeida, has a nice paper (here, and here)[8] that does similar things along these ES lines for extraction out of Wh-islands in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The paper uses ES methods to probe not only sensitivity to islands but also to compare how sensitive  different constructions are to island restrictions. The paper compares Topicalization and Left Dislocation showing that both induce island effects (as On WH Movement would lead us to expect). It also shows that BP here differs in part from English, raising further interesting research issues. I for one would love to see ES applied in comparing Topicalization, Left Dislocation and Hanging Topics in languages where one finds case connectivity effects. How do these do wrt islands? I can imagine a simple predication wherein case connectivity being a diagnostic of movement implies that Hanging Topics do not exhibit SA effects in island contexts. Is this so? I have no idea.

Diogo’s paper provides one further service. It provides a nice name for SA-without-unacceptability effects. Diogo dubs them “subliminal islands.” Diogo argues that the simple existence of subliminal effects has interesting implications for how we understand SA effects. He argues, convincingly IMO, that we expect subliminal effects if grammaticality is one component of acceptability, not so much if we take a performance view of islands. The paper also has a nice discussion of the conceptual relation between acceptability and grammaticality that I recommend highly.

Ok, time to end. I have two concluding points.

First, IMO, this kind of work demonstrates that ES can tell us something that we didn’t know before. Heretofore, ES work has aimed to either re-establish prior results (Jon’s work was aimed at showing that island effects are real) or to defend the homeland against the barbarians (Jon & Co arguing that informal methods are more than good enough much of the time). Here, KLS and Diogo’s paper show that we can resolve old problems and learn new things using these methods. In particular, these papers show that ES methods can open up new questions even in well-understood domains. In particular, I believe that both papers show that ES has the potential to reinvigorate research into the grammatical structure of islands. I mention this because many syntacticians have been wary of ES, thinking that it would just make everyone’s cushy life harder. And though I generally agree, that ES methods do not displace the more informal ones we use, these papers demonstrate that they can have real value and we should not be afraid (or reluctant) of using them.

Second, go out and celebrate. Tell friends about this stuff. It’s science at its best. Yipee!

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[1] The impression I have (even after Athens) is that such speculation is considered to be just this side of BS.  At the very least it really plays (and can play) no serious role in our practice. I may be a tad over-sensitive here.

[2] The fact that such a crude method of data collection has proven to be so reliable and useful raises an interesting question IMO: why? Why should such a dumb method of gathering data work so well? I believe that this is a function of the modularity of FL and the fact that Gs play a prominent role in all aspects of linguistic performance. More exactly, how Gs are used affects performance but performance does not affect how Gs are structured. Thus Gs make an invariant and important contribution to each performance. This is why their effects can be so easily detected, even using crude methods. At any rate, whether this diagnosis is correct, the fact that such a crude probe has been so successful is worth trying to understand.

[3] Note that this implies that the challenges to the universality of islands based on Scandinavian data were reasonable, even if ultimately wrong.

[4] See Jon’s thesis here, or many of his other writings for a simple explanation of these effects.

[5] KLS discusses Wh islands, Noun complement islands, subject islands and adjunct islands. It does not address relative clauses. However, Dave Kush has told me that they have looked at these too and the results are as expected: Scandinavian shows the same SA profile for RCs as for all the others.

[6] There is a kind of judgment one often hears from linguists which this methodology questions. It’s “the sentence is not perfect but it is grammatical.” The ES methodology suggests that one treat this kind of judgment very gingerly for it might indicate the underlying effects of the relevant G distinction, not its absence, as is typically concluded. Note that the quoted judgment above runs together “acceptable” and “grammatical” in a not wholly coherent way. It relies on the assumption that informal judgments concerning degree of unacceptability is a reliable probe of the binary grammatical/ungrammatical distinction. In other words, it assumes that grammaticality is binary (which it may be, but who knows) and that the severity of an acceptability judgment can reliably indicate the grammatical status of a structure. This assumption is challenged in the KLS paper.

[7] Sprouse’s thesis already demonstrated how e.g. D-linking could affect overall acceptability (i.e. the binary judgment) without inducing an SA signature.

[8] Same paper but for formatting. Latter is published version for citation purposes.

A Clever New Syntactic Tool

In a recent post I adverted to some of the new experimental syntax tools honed by Jon Sprouse for investigating grammatical structure.  Here's another very clever use of current technology that Matt Wagers thunk up. I will feed you a teaser and leave a URL. It's very clever and even theoretically suggestive. Here's the intro and here the URL:

"... aircraft carriers where planes land on them"

Resumptive pronouns and the not-quite-verbatim memory of Twitter users

Matt Wagers
updated 28 October, 2012

In the 3rd Presidential Debate (Oct 22, 2012), one of President Obama's most talked about retorts to Governor Romney was the following:

Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets — (laughter) — because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

Notably (to a linguist), Obama appeared to link two clauses via a resumptive pronoun. The two clauses are in bold, the resumptive underlined. Resumptive pronouns are a grammatical device found in many languages of the world (1), but they are reliably not judged as acceptable in English (2; despite seemingly being often produced).

A look at how Twitter users reported Obama's zinger provides some insight into how sentences containing resumptives are encoded. Although many users might copy and paste the text from a transcript, others will simply try to reproduce what they heard from memory.Verbatim memory is difficult to achieve in most contexts, since memory for exact form appears to be rather labile. Indeed, when people do reproduce exact form, it appears they mostly don't rely on any surface representation (i.e., anything like a 'mental transcript'); instead speakers reformulate based on the gist of what was heard and the recently activated lexical items (3). In other words, recollection of linguistic form from memory involves some reformulation of the underlying message. Thus seeing how ungrammatical sentences are repeated can give us insight into their underlying representation.