Linguistics
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Item Explorations in Diagnosing Competence and Performance Factors in Linguistic Inquiry(2022) Liter, Adam; Lidz, Jeffrey; Hornstein, Norbert; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take of linguistic performance do transparently reflect the underlying grammatical competence that is the target of inquiry. This has been a very useful and fruitful assumption in the vast majority of cases. Nonetheless, there are certain cases where more careful consideration of the linking hypothesis between the underlying competence of interest and the measurements of linguistic behavior (i.e., performance) that one takes might be warranted. This dissertation presents three case studies that try to model such consideration. How performance and competence might interact is highly dependent on the phenomenon being investigated as well as the method being used to investigate it, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to these kinds of considerations. The goal of this dissertation is to model such consideration and to encourage more of it. In Chapter 2, we investigate English-acquiring children’s non-adult-like productions of medial wh-phrases. On the basis of experimental data showing a correlation between an independent measure of cognitive inhibition and the production of such examples, we will argue that the best explanation of these productions is that children fail to inhibit the pronunciation of the wh-copy at the intermediate clause boundary due to an underdeveloped executive function and that children do have the target adult-like English grammar with respect to the formation of wh-dependencies (contra, e.g., Thornton 1990, McDaniel, Chiu, & Maxfield 1995, de Villiers, de Villiers, & Roeper 2011). Then, in Chapter 4, we investigate the status of island violations under sluicing (i.e., TP ellipsis). Sluicing apparently improves the acceptability of island violations contained inside the ellipsis site (see, e.g., Ross 1969). Whether we should understood this improved acceptability as indicative of such examples being grammatical is an open question (cf. Ross 1969, Chomsky 1972, Lasnik 2001, Fox & Lasnik 2003, Merchant 2005, 2008b, 2009, Temmerman 2013, Griffiths & Lipták 2014, Barros 2014a, Barros, Elliott, & Thoms 2014, 2015). We investigate the status of such examples with several 2 × 2 experiments, an experimental paradigm discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The idea of the experimental design is to use differences between acceptability ratings and subtraction logic afforded by the linking hypothesis between acceptability and grammaticality to try to more directly get at grammaticality. Our results from this chapter are ultimately somewhat inconclusive, but for potentially methodologically informative reasons. Finally, in Chapter 5, we use the same kind of experimental paradigm to investigate the status of Bulgarian examples with multiple wh-dependencies, where one of the wh-dependencies crosses an island and the other does not. Bulgarian is a language with multiple fronting of wh-elements, and it has been observed that examples where one of the wh-dependencies spans an island but not the other are improved in acceptability (see, e.g., Richards 1997, 1998, 2001). Such examples have thus been taken to be grammatical, though they do still exhibit some degree of unacceptability. We use the same sort of experimental paradigm to try to ascertain the grammaticality status of these examples. We find evidence that such examples are indeed grammatical, which reaffirms the importance of ensuring our syntactic theories can account for such examples.Item Functional structure in the noun phrase: revisiting Hebrew nominals(Glossa: a journal of general linguistics (Ubiquity Press), 2020-05-12) Preminger, OmerThis paper revisits Ritter’s (1991) findings concerning Hebrew nominals in light of recent arguments that nominal phrases are headed by the noun itself (rather than enclosed in functional structure), and shows that the force of Ritter’s argument is as strong as it ever was. It provides strong evidence in favor of functional structure above the projection of the noun itself.Item The acquisition of adjunct control: grammar and processing(2016) Gerard, Juliana; Lidz, Jeffrey; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation uses children’s acquisition of adjunct control as a case study to investigate grammatical and performance accounts of language acquisition. In previous research, children have consistently exhibited non-adultlike behavior for sentences with adjunct control. To explain children’s behavior, several different grammatical accounts have been proposed, but evidence for these accounts has been inconclusive. In this dissertation, I take two approaches to account for children’s errors. First, I spell out the predictions of previous grammatical accounts, and test these predictions after accounting for some methodological concerns that might have influenced children’s behavior in previous studies. While I reproduce the non-adultlike behavior observed in previous studies, the predictions of previous grammatical accounts are not borne out, suggesting that extragrammatical factors are needed to explain children’s behavior. Next, I consider the role of two different types of extragrammatical factors in predicting children’s non-adultlike behavior. With a new task designed to address the task demands in previous studies, children exhibit significantly higher accuracy than with previous tasks. This suggests that children’s behavior has been influenced by task- specific processing factors. In addition to the task, I also test the predictions of a similarity-based interference account, which links children’s errors to the same memory mechanisms involved in sentence processing difficulties observed in adults. These predictions are borne out, supporting a more continuous developmental trajectory as children’s processing mechanisms become more resistant to interference. Finally, I consider how children’s errors might influence their acquisition of adjunct control, given the distribution in the linguistic input. I discuss the results of a corpus analysis, including the possibility that adjunct control could be learned from the input. The kinds of information that could be useful to a learner become much more limited, however, after considering the processing limitations that would interfere with the representations available to the learner.Item Verb Learning Under Guidance(2015) He, Xiaoxue Angela; Lidz, Jeffrey; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Any kind of uninstructed learning, faced by the challenge that any finite experience is consistent with infinitely many hypotheses, must proceed under guidance. This dissertation investigates guided vocabulary acquisition with a focus on verb learning. In particular, it examines some proposed early expectations that the young language learner may hold as guidance in learning novel verbs, and investigates the nature of these expectations from different angles. Four lines of studies are reported, each discussing a different question. Study 1 focuses on the expectation that the grammatical category verb picks out the conceptual category event - the verb-event bias, and examines the early developmental trajectory of this bias, which may shed light on its origin: whether it is specified within UG or generalized inductively from input. Study 2 further asks how specific/general the learner's initial expectations about verb meanings are, and thus what is the expected degree of extendibility of verb meanings. Study 3 investigates the proposed expectation that the number of event participants aligns with the number of syntactic arguments - the participant-argument-match (PAM) bias, and questions the utility of this bias in face of potential mismatch cases; in particular, some plausible 3-participant events are naturally described by 2-argument sentences. Study 4 looks at the proposed expectation that objects name patients (ONP) and asks a question about its exact nature in face of cross-linguistic variation - whether objects are expected to name patients of the clause's event, or to name patients of the verb's event, and whether it varies cross-linguistically. Together, this dissertation provides new evidence that the language learner acquires verb meanings under guidance, asks new questions about the natures of some verb-learning guides, and highlights several issues the current acquisition theory needs to address.