UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Island Constraints: What is there for children to learn?(2022) Hirzel, Mina; Lidz, Jeffrey; Lau, Ellen; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents behavioral studies that target the early syntactic representations of wh-movement during infancy and early childhood. Previous studies show that by 20 months-old, infants represent wh-movement and use this knowledge to respond to wh-questions during language comprehension tasks (Gagliardi 2012; Gagliardi et al., 2016; Seidl et al., 2003). Studies probing the nature of early representations of wh-movement show that by around 4 years-old, children represent island constraints (e.g., de Villiers et al., 1990; de Villiers & Roeper, 1995a, 1995b; Fetters & Lidz, 2016; Goodluck et al., 1992). It remains unclear how knowledge of wh-movement develops. What is the source of this ‘empirical gap’ between the onset of knowledge of wh- movement, and the observation that children respect island constraints? One possibility is that knowledge of island constraints is a component of Universal Grammar (e.g., Chomsky 1965, 1986; Hornstein & Lightfoot 1981). In this case, the ‘empirical gap’ in the linguistic abilities of infants compared to young children isn’t indicative of their linguistic knowledge, but rather the difficulties with testing infants and toddlers on complex syntax. Another possibility is that knowledge of island constraints is acquired via experience (e.g., Pearl & Sprouse, 2013). In this case, the ‘empirical gap’ reflects a knowledge gap, and there’s no evidence for knowledge of island constraints during infancy because it has yet to be acquired. Experiment 1 shows that by 19 months-old, infants have knowledge of wh-movement, and use this knowledge during language comprehension. Results are consistent with recent work which shows that 18 month-olds, but not 17 month-olds, know that wh-phrases co-occur with gap positions in wh-object questions (Perkins & Lidz, 2021). Experiment 2 shows that 3 year-olds respect locality constraints on wh-movement in wh- questions, and Experiment 3 shows that adults behave as expected on this task. Experiments 4 and 5 test children and adults on locality constraints on wh- movement in relative clauses, but these results are inconclusive (likely due to difficulties with moving the task online). The results of Experiment 3 raises challenges for learning hypotheses of island constraints which emphasize the role of linguistic experience. Learning models which propose that linguistic experience is the key factor in the acquisition of island constraints must consider these behavioral results when estimating the amount of data that the learner needs to solve the acquisition problem. These behavioral results are consistent with the hypothesis that knowledge of island constraints is innate, but further work is needed to close the ‘empirical gap’ between the onset of knowledge of wh- movement and the onset of knowledge of island constraints.Item Phasehood and Phi-Intervention(2021) Thivierge, Sigwan; Preminger, Omer; Polinsky, Maria; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the notion of phases in syntactic theory, and offers a reanalysis of certain phases as instances of phi(φ)-intervention. Under the standard view, phases are syntactic structures that, according to the Phase Impenetrability Condition, are opaque to operations originating outside of the phase (Chomsky, 2000; 2001). Phasehood was linked to certain heads such as C and (transitive) v, but several issues arise once the empirical domain is broadened beyond English. As more work has turned to unrelated languages, a less stipulative alternative has presented itself: phases are intervention effects, and are reducible to a more general locality issue. In Rackowski and Richards’ (2005) account of Tagalog wh-movement, for example, CPs act as phases because they constitute the closest goal. In Halpert’s (2019) account of Zulu hyper-raising, CPs do not act as phases due to the cyclic nature of Agree. In Keine’s (2017) account of Hindi long-distance agreement, vPs do not act as phases, which I argue is because v is not a φ-goal. In Georgian, vPs act as phases because v0, in contrast, is a φ-goal (as I will argue in this thesis). These languages show that XPs act as phases only when they are potential goals for a syntactic operation. These languages also illustrate two ways of diagnosing phasehood as φ-intervention: via movement out of the domain, and via agreement into the domain. These results suggest that phasehood is an epiphenomenon, and that the interior of the ‘phase’ is accessible even after the phase is complete. In this dissertation, I argue that certain instances of phasehood derive from the ‘phase’ head bearing a φ-probe: the φ-features on the probe intervene for φ-agreement, which results in phase-like effects. The empirical data in favour this claim comes from the Georgian agreement system. I show that subjects in Georgian are base-generated in different positions, depending on whether they fall under the basic agreement paradigm or the inverse agreement paradigm. In the basic, subjects are introduced above v and are the closest goal for Agree operations that originate outside the vP domain. In the inverse, subjects are introduced below v; in this case, the φ-features that are associated with the φ-probe on v constitute the closest goal for Agree.Item When does ellipsis occur, and what is elided?(2017) Park, Dongwoo; Lasnik, Howard; Preminger, Omer; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is concerned with how elliptical sentences are generated. To be specific, I investigate when and in what module ellipsis occurs, and what is elided as a result of ellipsis. With regard to the first research question, I propose that XP ellipsis occurs as soon as all the featural requirements of the licensor of XP ellipsis are satisfied during the derivation, rather than in the other modules. An important consequence of this proposal is that the point of XP ellipsis can vary depending on the derivational point where all the featural requirements of the licensor are satisfied in narrow syntax. Concerning the second research question, I suggest that ellipsis is a syntactic operation that eliminates phonological feature matrices of lexical items inside the ellipsis site, preserving the formal feature matrices. Segmental content (i.e. phonological features) is inserted into the phonological feature matrices when lexical items are sent to PF after Spell-out. This insertion does not apply to lexical items whose phonological feature matrices are eliminated, since there is no appropriate venue which segmental content is inserted into. Thus, they are not pronounced. This implies that even though narrow syntax cannot look into the information of the segmental content inside the phonological feature matrices, it can make reference to the phonological feature matrices in lexical items. This proposal is supported by the fact that elements whose phonological feature matrices have been eliminated can take part in further formal operations that occur after ellipsis, since they still contain formal features. However, unlike the other lexical items, elided interrogative wh-phrases do not seem to participate in formal operation occurring after ellipsis. In order to resolve this puzzle, I suggest a prosodic requirement questions must obey, adopting and modifying Richards’ (2016) Contiguity Theory. Standard English copular phrase ellipsis is mainly used to develop the present theory of ellipsis. Cross-linguistic evidence from Indian Vernacular English, Belfast English, Korean, Farsi, British English, and Dutch data is also provided to argue that the present theory of ellipsis is not restricted to English.Item On Experiencers and Minimality(2016) De Oliveira Almeida Petersen, Maria Carolina; Hornestein, Norbert; Lasnik, Howard; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is concerned with experiencer arguments, and what they tell us about the grammar. There are two main types of experiencers I discuss: experiencers of psychological verbs and experiencers of raising constructions. I question the notion of ‘experiencers’ itself; and explore some possible accounts for the ‘psych-effects’. I argue that the ‘experiencer theta role’ is conceptually unnecessary and unsustained by syntactic evidence. ‘Experiencers’ can be reduced to different types of arguments. Taking Brazilian Portuguese as my main case study, I claim that languages may grammaticalize psychological predicates and their arguments in different ways. These verb classes exist in languages independently, and the psych-verbs behavior can be explained by the argument structure of the verbal class they belong to. I further discuss experiencers in raising structures, and the defective intervention effects triggered by different types of experiencers (e.g., DPs, PPs, clitics, traces) in a variety of languages. I show that defective intervention is mostly predictable across languages, and there’s not much variation regarding its effects. Moreover, I argue that defective intervention can be captured by a notion of minimality that requires interveners to be syntactic objects and not syntactic occurrences (a chain, and not a copy/trace). The main observation is that once a chain is no longer in the c-command domain of a probe, defective intervention is obviated, i.e., it doesn’t apply. I propose a revised version of the Minimal Link Condition (1995), in which only syntactic objects may intervene in syntactic relations, and not copies. This view of minimality can explain the core cases of defective intervention crosslinguistically.Item The Syntax of Non-syntactic Dependencies(2013) Larson, Bradley Theodore; Hornstein, Norbert; Lasnik, Howard; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I explore the nature of interpretive dependencies in human language. In particular I investigate the limits of syntactically mediated interpretive dependencies as well as non-syntactic ones. Broadly speaking I investigate the limits of grammatical dependencies and note that current theory cannot possibly handle certain dependencies. That certain dependencies evade grammatical explanation requires a rethinking of the representations of those dependencies. The results of this investigation concern the primacy and the purview of the syntax component of the grammar. In short, the purview of syntactic relations is limited to c-command and if a c-command relation holds between two related elements, a syntactic relation must hold between them, either directly or indirectly. When c-command does not hold between the related elements, a syntactic dependency is not possible and the dependency must hold at a subsequent level of representation. To show this, I explore interpretive dependencies that I argue only superficially resemble standard, syntactically-mediated relations (such as Wh-gap dependencies). I show that these dependencies are not amenable to analysis as syntactically-mediated relations. These include Coordinated-Wh Questions like those explored in Gracanin-Yuksek 2007, Right Node Raising constructions like those explored in Postal 1974, and Across-the-board constructions like those explored in Williams 1978. Each of these involves an interpretive dependency that I claim cannot be derived syntactically. The above constructions evade explanation via traditional syntactic tools as well as semantic and pragmatic means of analysis. If the above constructions involve dependencies that cannot be construed as syntactically-, semantically-, or pragmatically-mediated, it must be the case that these otherwise normal dependencies are captured via other means, whatever that may be.Item Respecting Relations: Memory Access and Antecedent Retrieval in Incremental Sentence Processing(2013) Kush, Dave W; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation uses the processing of anaphoric relations to probe how linguistic information is encoded in and retrieved from memory during real-time sentence comprehension. More specifically, the dissertation attempts to resolve a tension between the demands of a linguistic processor implemented in a general-purpose cognitive architecture and the demands of abstract grammatical constraints that govern language use. The source of the tension is the role that abstract configurational relations (such as c-command, Reinhart 1983) play in constraining computations. Anaphoric dependencies are governed by formal grammatical constraints stated in terms of relations. For example, Binding Principle A (Chomsky 1981) requires that antecedents for local anaphors (like the English reciprocal each other) bear the c-command relation to those anaphors. In incremental sentence processing, antecedents of anaphors must be retrieved from memory. Recent research has motivated a model of processing that exploits a cue-based, associative retrieval process in content-addressable memory (e.g. Lewis, Vasishth & Van Dyke 2006) in which relations such as c-command are difficult to use as cues for retrieval. As such, the c-command constraints of formal grammars are predicted to be poorly implemented by the retrieval mechanism. I examine retrieval's sensitivity to three constraints on anaphoric dependencies: Principle A (via Hindi local reciprocal licensing), the Scope Constraint on bound-variable pronoun licensing (often stated as a c-command constraint, though see Barker 2012), and Crossover constraints on pronominal binding (Postal 1971, Wasow 1972). The data suggest that retrieval exhibits fidelity to the constraints: structurally inaccessible NPs that match an anaphoric element in morphological features do not interfere with the retrieval of an antecedent in most cases considered. In spite of this alignment, I argue that retrieval's apparent sensitivity to c-command constraints need not motivate a memory access procedure that makes direct reference to c-command relations. Instead, proxy features and general parsing operations conspire to mimic the extension of a system that respects c-command constraints. These strategies provide a robust approximation of grammatical performance while remaining within the confines of a independently- motivated general-purpose cognitive architecture.Item Binding Phenomena Within A Reductionist Theory of Grammatical Dependencies(2011) Drummond, Alex; Hornstein, Norbert; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis investigates the implications of binding phenomena for the development of a reductionist theory of grammatical dependencies. The starting point is the analysis of binding and control in Hornstein (2001, 2009). A number of revisions are made to this framework in order to develop a simpler and empirically more successful account of binding phenomena. The major development is the rejection of economy-based accounts of Condition B effects. It is argued that Condition B effects derive directly from an anti-locality constraint on A-movement. Competition between different dependency types is crucial to the analysis, but is formulated in terms of a heavily revised version of Reinhart's (2006) "No Sneaking" principle, rather than in terms of a simple economy preference for local over non-local dependencies. In contrast to Reinhart's No Sneaking, the condition presented here ("Keeping Up Appearances") has a phonologically rather than semantically specified comparison set. A key claim of the thesis is that the morphology of pronouns and reflexives is of little direct grammatical import. It is argued that much of the complexity of the contemporary binding literature derives from the attempt to capture the distribution of pronouns and reflexives in largely, or purely, syntactic and semantic terms. The analysis presented in this dissertation assigns a larger role to language-specific "spellout" rules, and to general pragmatic/interpretative principles governing the choice between competing morphemes. Thus, a core assumption of binding theory from LGB onwards is rejected: there is no syntactic theory which accounts for the distribution of pronouns and reflexives. Rather, there is a core theory of grammatical dependencies which must be conjoined with with phonological, morphological and pragmatic principles to yield the distributional facts in any given language. In this respect, the approach of the thesis is strictly non-lexicalist: there are no special lexical items which trigger certain kinds of grammatical dependency. All non-strictly-local grammatical dependencies are formed via A- or A-chains, and copies in these chains are pronounced according to a mix of universal principles and language-specific rules. The broader goal of the thesis is to further the prospects for a "reductionist" approach to grammatical dependencies along these lines. The most detailed empirical component of the thesis is an investigation of the problem posed by binding out of prepositional phrases. Even in a framework incorporating sideward movement, the apparent lack of c-command in this configuration poses a problem. Chapter 3 attempts to revive a variant of the traditional "reanalysis" account of binding out of PP. This segues into an investigation of certain properties of pseudopassivization and preposition stranding. The analyses in this thesis are stated within an informal syntactic framework. However, in order to investigate the precise implications of a particular economy condition, Merge over Move, a partial formalization of this framework is developed in chapter 4. This permits the economy condition to be stated precisely, and in a manner which does not have adverse implications for computational complexity.Item Structured Access in Sentence Comprehension(2011) Dillon, Brian William; Phillips, Colin; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is concerned with the nature of memory access during the construction of long-distance dependencies in online sentence comprehension. In recent years, an intense focus on the computational challenges posed by long-distance dependencies has proven to be illuminating with respect to the characteristics of the architecture of the human sentence processor, suggesting a tight link between general memory access procedures and sentence processing routines (Lewis & Vasishth 2005; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke 2006; Wagers, Lau & Phillips 2009). The present thesis builds upon this line of research, and its primary aim is to motivate and defend the hypothesis that the parser accesses linguistic memory in an essentially structured fashion for certain long-distance dependencies. In order to make this case, I focus on the processing of reflexive and agreement dependencies, and ask whether or not non-structural information such as morphological features are used to gate memory access during syntactic comprehension. Evidence from eight experiments in a range of methodologies in English and Chinese is brought to bear on this question, providing arguments from interference effects and time-course effects that primarily syntactic information is used to access linguistic memory in the construction of certain long-distance dependencies. The experimental evidence for structured access is compatible with a variety of architectural assumptions about the parser, and I present one implementation of this idea in a parser based on the ACT-R memory architecture. In the context of such a content-addressable model of memory, the claim of structured access is equivalent to the claim that only syntactic cues are used to query memory. I argue that structured access reflects an optimal parsing strategy in the context of a noisy, interference-prone cognitive architecture: abstract structural cues are favored over lexical feature cues for certain structural dependencies in order to minimize memory interference in online processing.Item Dimensions of Ellipsis: Investigations in Turkish(2009) Ince, Atakan; Lasnik, Howard; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the elliptical structures of (a) sluicing (John called someone, but I don't know who!), (b) fragment answers (A: Who did John call?, B: Mary!), (c) gapping (John is eating ice-cream, and Mary apple pie!), and (d) Right Node Raising (John cooked and Mary ate the apple pie!) in Turkish and gives a `PF-deletion'-based analysis of all these elliptical structures. As to sluicing and fragment answers, evidence in support of PF-deletion comes from P-(non-)stranding and Case Matching, respectively. Further, these elliptical structures are island-insensitive in Turkish. As to gapping, this study gives a `movement + deletion' analysis, in which remnants in the second conjunct raise to the left periphery of the second conjunct and the rest of the second conjunct is elided. One striking property of gapping in Turkish is that it is a root phenomenon; in other words, it cannot occur in complement clauses, for instance. As to Right Node Raising, again, a PF-deletion analysis is given: the identical element(s) in the first conjunct is/are elided under identity with (an) element(s) in the second conjunct. The striking property of RNR is that remnants in this elliptical structure may not be clause-mate, in contrast to other elliptical structures -where remnants can be non-clause-mate under very specific contexts. This, I suggest, is due to the fact that PF-deletion in RNR applies at a later derivational stage than in other elliptical structures. In this stage, a syntactic derivation consists of linearized (sub-)lexical forms, where there is no hierarchical representation. This also suggests that Markovian system exists in grammar. In brief, this thesis looks at different elliptical structures in Turkish, and gives arguments for PF-deletion for all these elliptical structures, which has interesting implications for the generative theory.