As children acquire the core rules of their language, they also develop the ability to use it in a sociolinguistically adapted way. Although some works have addressed the production of sociolinguistic variables, few have explored the development of a sociolinguistic evaluative competence in children and their ability to pair linguistic forms and social meanings. With an aged-adapted matched-guise paradigm, we investigate how monolingual children aged between 3 and 11 years old (N = 136) acquire French WH- interrogatives. The acquisition of the variants available in adult French has often been linked to their syntactic complexity, but the quantitative data we present offer new insights. By comparing the adult and child networks of social representations associated with interrogative variants, we show that some linguistic forms carry social meaning very early on. This is evidence for a more complex picture of the factors weighing on how children may acquire competing syntactic variants.

As many other languages, French uses a variety of rival suffixes to form names of inhabitants, or demonyms, out of place names, or toponyms; most prominently the suffixes -ais (Marseille > Marseillais), -ois (Lille > Lillois), -éen (Nancy > Nancéen) and -ien (Paris > Parisien). Existing literature on the topic has focused on documenting phonological and geographical factors influencing the choice of affix on the basis of examination of the established lexicon. This paper reports on an experimental study probing the preferences of speakers in nonce formations, focusing on the influence of phonological factors. Experimental results provide evidence that speakers are sensitive to phonological properties of the base when coining a demonym, but differ in subtle and interesting ways from what can be concluded from the established lexicon. Beyond studying the formation of French demonyms, this paper highlights the usefulness of experiments as complementary to the examination of the established lexicon in the study of morphological rivalry.

Differences in the processing of subject and object relative clauses have been explained by a combination of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors, such as a general subject advantage based on syntactic constraints, effects of animacy, and the discourse status of relative clause internal subjects. In this paper, we will focus on a factor related to verb meaning, the implicit causality of the verb, which biases the principal causer of the event described by the verb. Depending on whether the bias is on the subject or the object, implicit causality can conflict with the foregrounded antecedent of the relative clause, leading to increased difficulty in comprehension. We tested this hypothesis by manipulating implicit causality in subject and object relative clauses. We used both offline (acceptability judgment task) and online (self-paced reading task) methods to observe at which stage of processing implicit causality influences comprehension. Our findings from acceptability judgments showed that object relative clauses with subject-biased verbs were the least acceptable and the least understood. Conversely, object relative clauses with object-biased verbs were as acceptable and easy to understand as subject relative clauses in French. However, results from self-paced reading indicated that subject-biased verbs were more difficult to process regardless of the construction, suggesting that the integration of implicit causality occurs at a later level of processing, such as in acceptability judgments and comprehension questions. Further acceptability judgment tasks suggested that implicit causality influences relative clause acceptability beyond word order and thematic roles. We propose linking the role of implicit causality with the function of a restrictive relative clause and introduce the Aboutness Hypothesis to explain relative clause processing: a relative clause is more acceptable and easier to understand when everything contributes to making the head its optimal aboutness topic.

In this paper, we will study the use of null pronouns on the one hand and the interpretation of null and pronominal subjects on the other hand in Romanian. While both questions have been studied across a wide range of Romance languages, empirical data on Romanian are still missing in the literature. Our first three experiments, using a binary choice of possible answers to questions, show that null subjects are generally preferred in Romanian. This preference is, however, modified by the contrast effect with more pronominal subjects when there is an alternative explicit or presupposed referent in the context. In our fourth experiment, we find that, as in other Romance languages, null subjects prefer a subject antecedent while pronominal subjects prefer a non-subject antecedent, showing the typical division of labour effect. The preference for null subjects in our experiment is slightly smaller than in Italian or European Portuguese, two languages that show a stronger division of labour effect with near categorical choices of subject and object antecedents for null and pronominal subjects, respectively. Preferences found for Romanian resemble those found for Spanish. We argue that the frequency of null subjects in a language may play a role in the strength of the division of labour effect.

This paper brings new theoretical and experimental evidence to bear on the classical question of whether Verb Phrase Ellipsis requires a syntactically identical antecedent and how it differs, in this respect, from the Verb Phrase Anaphor do it. We focus on the case of VPE with nominal antecedents and argue that it is always grammatical. Its acceptability is variable and is predicted by a discourse condition on VPE, namely that VPE prefers a salient alternative in the discourse context and that the elliptical clause must select one branch of the alternative (Miller and Pullum 2014). We argue that nominal antecedents are only acceptable in those special cases where a noun can express such an alternative. Specifically we focus on the case of ‘polar nouns’, which can function as a type of polar concealed question, making a polar alternative salient. We provide experimental evidence, based on online acceptability judgments, showing (i) that VPE is judged more acceptable than do it when the discourse condition is met, regardless of whether the alternative is expressed by a verb or a noun; (ii) that nominal antecedents are judged slightly less acceptable than verbal antecedents in such cases. In conclusion, we argue that VPE simply requires accessing an antecedent satisfying the discourse constraints within the context but that the heuristic strategies of the parser make use of all available evidence, including syntactic structure in short term memory, making syntactically identical antecedents easier to process and hence slightly more acceptable.

The article presents four acceptability judgment experiments that evaluate novel predictions of the Focus-Background Conflict constraint (Abeillé et al. 2020, Cognition) with respect to the acceptability of long distance dependencies for so-called "subject islands" in English and French. In contrast with syntactic accounts, the Focus-Background Conflict constraint predicts differential behavior across different constructions. The current paper tests a novel prediction of this theory, in a construction that has not yet been tested experimentally: it-clefts. Experiment 1 shows that elements in clefted clauses are not uniformly backgrounded, contrary to a standard assumption in the syntax / discourse literature. Experiments 2-4 tested long-distance dependency relations in relative clauses and clefts. In both languages, there is strong evidence of a cross-construction difference when comparing the two constructions with each other: extraction of the subject complement out of a subject NP was super-additively difficult in clefts, but not in relative clauses, as predicted by the Focus-Background Conflict constraint.

Right-Node Raising is generally considered to impose stricter identity conditions than other kinds of ellipsis, such as VP ellipsis, according to Hankamer & Sag 1976 and Hardt 1993. In this paper, we investigate voice mismatch in French Right-Node Raising (RNR) through a corpus study and two experiments. We show that RNR with voice mismatch can be found in a written corpus (frTenTen 2012) and that many examples involve coordination of a reflexive active and a short passive form. We suggest this is because semantic contrast (here, between self and external agent) plays a role according to Hartmann (2000) and Abeillé and Mouret (2010). We ran two acceptability judgement experiments to test voice mismatch and semantic contrast. We did not find any penalty for voice mismatch with VP ellipsis but an interaction with semantic contrast. We also found an effect of semantic contrast when coordinating an active and a passive VP without participle ellipsis. We conclude that voice mismatch is acceptable with RNR and propose a Head-driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis, following Chaves (2014) and Shiraïshi et al. (2019).

There are three main approaches to the (un)acceptability of long-distance dependencies (LDD): syntactic theories, processing theories, and discourse theories.Syntactic theories argue constraints on LDD are universal and purely syntactic, predicting these constraints should hold across languages and constructions.This study probes into the acceptability of topicalization from English and Mandarin if-clauses and that-clauses through contextualized acceptability judgment experiment, finding no adjunct island effect in either language, which supports the discourse approach, arguing that the discourse status of the extracted element in the construction is at play (focus status of the extracted element depends on the construction).If there is a focus status conflict between the element and construction, the penalty will appear.

Unlike perception studies, production studies have so far failed to prime intonational phrase structure. One reason for this might be syntactically-biased materials. This study aims to assess whether prosodic boundaries can be primed in production when their saliency is not reduced by a strong syntactic bias. We replicated the prosodic priming paradigm from Tooley et al. (2014, 2018) in an online production study testing two constructions: the original PP-attachment (transfer of location) sentences used by Tooley et al. and newly constructed relative clause attachment constructions. A norming study confirmed a strong syntactic bias in the original materials while showing more balanced preferences for RC attachment. Prosodic analyses revealed a priming effect for RC attachment constructions only, suggesting that intonational phrase structure can be primed in production in proper conditions.

Subject inversion in French is usually considered to be optional (Le Bidois 1952; Kayne & Pollock 1978) and more costly than variants with preverbal subject. As the result of verb movement (Hulk & Pollock 2001), it is claimed to demand higher processing cost (Holmes & O’Regan 1981). However, some studies suggest that subject inversion in relative clauses may even be favoured by certain semantic or heaviness constraints (Fuchs 2006; Marandin 2011). In this paper, we take an empirical approach to this question. In our corpus study using the French Treebank described in Abeillé et al. (2019), we found that subject inversion in object relatives can be as frequent as cases without inversion. We also found that inversion is preferred with longer subjects and shorter and non-agentive verbs. This pattern was confirmed in an acceptability judgement experiment as well as in a self-paced reading experiment. Thus, object relatives with and without inversion are not merely stylistic variants (i.e. two equivalent syntactic ways of expressing one meaning), but are more or less preferred depending on their properties. Our results are compatible with semantic accounts of relative clause processing (Mak et al. 2006; Traxler et al. 2002).

Dans deux expériences, chacune réalisée en français et en anglais, nous montrons que la préférence d’attachement d’une phrase relative à une coordination de syntagmes nominaux peut être modifiée par la longueur du premier conjoint. Alors qu’un attachement haut à la coordination est généralement préféré dans les deux langues, un attachement bas au second conjoint seulement devient plus acceptable pour les phrases dont le premier conjoint est plus long. Ces résultats sont compatibles avec le principe des sœurs de même taille (Fodor 1998, 2002) qui suggère qu’une préférence prosodique pour les unités de taille équilibrée s’applique également au traitement du langage écrit, selon l’hypothèse de la prosodie implicite.

In two experiments, each run in French and in English, we show that the length of the first conjunct can modify the attachment preference of a relative clause to two coordinated noun phrases. While high attachment to the coordination of the noun phrases is generally preferred across languages, low attachment to only the second conjunct becomes more acceptable for sentences with a longer first conjunct. These results are compatible with the Same-Size-Sisters principle (Fodor 1998, 2002), which suggests that a prosodic preference for units of balanced size also applies to the processing of written language via the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis.

We investigate the impact of syntactic alternatives on pronoun resolution in ambiguous constructions in English and French. Previous research detected language-specific preferences in pronoun resolution in utterances of the type “The postman met the streetsweeper before he went home”. These preferences have been attributed to the interaction of information structural and syntactic constraints inducing a subject bias on the one hand, and Gricean reasoning processes taking into account alternative syntactic constructions on the other hand. A corpus study of four English and French corpora shows that an alternative construction which takes a subject antecedent (“The postman met the streetsweeper before going home”) is much less frequent in spoken English than French. A Rational Speech Act (RSA) model with corpus frequencies integrated as language-specific costs on the use of each construction makes empirical predictions for pronoun resolution preferences in French and English for sentences with “avant”/“before” which have been tested before but also for sentences with “après”/“after” which have not been tested so far. New experimental data show a very good fit of the model predictions for pronoun resolution preferences in English as well as for the differences in antecedent choices between French and English. However, experimental data showing differences in antecedent choices between French sentences with “après” and “avant” deviate from model predictions, indicating that more factors need to be taken into account. The combination of Bayesian modeling, corpus analyses and experimental data shows that RSA models can make relevant and falsifiable predictions for cross-linguistic variation in processing.

Ross (1967) observed that “island” structures like “Who do you think [NP the gift from __] prompted the rumor?” or “Who did you hear [NP the statement [S that the CEO promoted __]]?” are not acceptable, despite having what seem to be plausible meanings in some contexts. Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973) hypothesized that the source of the unacceptability is in the syntax. Here, we summarize how theories of discourse, frequency, and memory from the literature might account for such effects. We suggest that there is only one island structure -a class of coordination islands -that is best explained by a syntactic/semantic constraint. We speculate that all other island structures are likely to be explained in terms of discourse, frequency, and memory.