The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the feature aux , which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstressed do , and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.

This breakthrough article included early research into decompression and the first ever dive tables.It's just one of the treasures in the Cambridge Journals Digital Archive journals.cambridge.org/thebendsHill and Greenwood decompressed themselves, without any serious symptoms, after short exposures at excess pressures of as much as five and even six atmospheres."

This paper investigates experimentally the generalizations made in AnderBois (2010, 2011, 2014) that a sluice may never take an appositive clause as its antecedent. We find that experimental participants rated sentences with sluice-antecedents in appositives as acceptable. We highlight two factors which influence the acceptability of appositive antecedents for sluices: whether the indefinite NP antecedent and the stranded wh-item include descriptive content (e.g., a man, which man), and whether the appositive clause engages with an issue raised in the preceding context. We argue that AnderBois's claim that appositive clauses are conventionally unable to antecede sluices is too restrictive and suggest that any theory of sluicing must allow appositive clauses to antecede sluices.

We explore the consequences of letting the incremental and integrative nature of language processing inform the design of competence grammar. What emerges is a view of grammar as a system of local monotonic constraints that provide a direct characterization of the signs (the form-meaning correspondences) of a given language. This "sign-based" conception of grammar has provided precise solutions to the key problems long thought to motivate movement-based analyses, has supported three decades of computational research developing large-scale grammar implementations, and is now beginning to play a role in computational psycholinguistics research that explores the use of underspecification in the incremental computation of partial meanings.

abstractLinguistic acceptability judgments are widely agreed to reflect constraints on real-time language processing. Nonetheless, very little is known about how processing costs affect acceptability judgments. In this paper, we explore how processing limitations are manifested in acceptability judgment data. In a series of experiments, we consider how two factors relate to judgments for sentences with varying degrees of complexity: (1) the way constraints combine (i.e., additively or super-additively), and (2) the way a comprehender’s memory resources influence acceptability judgments. Results indicate that multiple sources of processing difficulty can combine to produce super-additive effects, and that there is a positive linear relationship between reading span scores and judgments for sentences whose unacceptability is attributable to processing costs. These patterns do not hold for sentences whose unacceptability is attributable to factors other than processing costs, e.g., grammatical constraints. We conclude that tests of (super)-additivity and of relationships to reading span scores can help to identify the effects of processing difficulty on acceptability judgments, although these tests cannot be used in contexts of extreme processing difficulty.

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Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically "superior" wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g. What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g. Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty.

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7.1 Origins of phrase structure analysis To understand the properties of modern phrase structure grammars, it is useful to place their development in a wider formal and historical context. Phrase structure grammars and associated notions of phrase structure analysis have their proximate origins in models of Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis. Although inspired by the programmatic syntactic remarks in Bloomfield (1933), these models were principally developed by Bloomfield's successors, most actively in the decade between the publication of Wells (1947) and the advent of transformational analyses in Harris (1957) and Chomsky (1957). The central intuition underlying models of IC analysis was that the structure of an expression could be exhibited by dividing the expression into parts (its immediate constituents), further subdividing these parts, and continuing until syntactically indivisible units were obtained. This style of analysis was motivated in part by a belief in the locality of syntactic relations, in particular the view that the most important relations held between immediate constituents. The process of analyzing syntax is largely one of finding successive layers of ICs and of immediate constructions, the description of relationships which exist between ICs, and the description of those relationships which are not efficiently described in terms of ICs. The last is generally of subsidiary importance; most of the relationships of any great significance are between ICs. Within the Bloomfieldian tradition, there was a fair degree of consensus regarding the application of syntactic methods as well as about the analyses associated with different classes of constructions. Some of the general features of IC analyses find an obvious reflex in subsequent models of analysis. Foremost among these is the idea that structure involves a part–whole relation between elements and a larger superordinate unit,

1 Background Modern grammatical research,1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, includes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surprisingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantiations of a single grammar that is fixed in its general shape. UG researchers put forth highly abstract hypotheses making use of a complex system of representations, operations, and constraints that are offered as a theory of the rich biological capacity that humans have for language.2 This community eschews writing explicit grammars of individual languages in favor of offering conjectures about the ‘parameters of variation’ that modulate the general grammatical scheme. These proposals are motivated by small data sets from a variety of languages. A second community, which we will refer to as the Typological (TYP) camp, is concerned with descriptive observations of individual languages, with particular concern for idiosyncrasies and complexities. Many TYP researchers eschew formal models (or leave their development to others), while others in this community refer to the theory they embrace as ‘Construction Grammar’ (CxG).

Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012) carried out two experiments in which they measured individual differences in memory to test processing accounts of island effects. They found that these individual differences failed to predict the magnitude of island effects, and they construe these findings as counterevidence to processing-based accounts of island effects. Here, we take up several problems with their methods, their findings, and their conclusions. First, the arguments against processing accounts are based on null results using tasks that may be ineffective or inappropriate measures of working memory (the n -back and serial-recall tasks). The authors provide no evidence that these two measures predict judgments for other constructions that are difficult to process and yet are clearly grammatical. They assume that other measures of working memory would have yielded the same result, but provide no justification that they should. We further show that whether a working-memory measure relates to judgments of grammatical, hard-to-process sentences depends on how difficult the sentences are. In this light, the stimuli used by the authors present processing difficulties other than the island violations under investigation and may have been particularly hard to process. Second, the Sprouse et al. results are statistically in line with the hypothesis that island sensitivity varies with working memory. Three out of the four island types in their experiment 1 show a significant relation between memory scores and island sensitivity, but the authors discount these findings on the grounds that the variance accounted for is too small to have much import. This interpretation, however, runs counter to standard practices in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and psychology.

Misapplying working-memory tests:A reductio ad absurdum* Philip Hofmeister, Laura Staum Casasanto, and Ivan A. Sag The preceding discussion note by Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012b; SWP2) sidesteps the objections we raised in our critique (Hofmeister et al. 2012; HSS) of their 2012a article (SWP1). In the process, they attempt to deflect attention away from the fundamental issue at stake: is the experimental method used by SWP1 an effective diagnostic of the role of processing factors in acceptability contrasts? The answer to this question, as far as anyone knows, is 'no'. Hence, as we argue in HSS, the absence of a correlation between memory measures and acceptability contrasts is unsurprising and in no way undermines processing-based accounts of island effects. Processing-based accounts of islands centered around working-memory (WM) limitations, like those of Kluender & Kutas 1993 and Hofmeister & Sag 2010, DO predict a relationship between WM measures and judgments for islands IF AND ONLY IF: (i) the relevant WM measures tap the resources used in processing sentences with island-violating dependencies, and (ii) the relevant examples allow for individual variation to emerge.1 But neither concern has been satisfied by SWP. They do not establish that their chosen memory measures (or any other) systematically relate to judgments for ANY hard-to-process but grammatical sentences, nor that this relationship applies universally across the spectrum of sentence processing difficulty. SWP2 fail to even address point (ii), while they attempt to defuse point (i) by a purely 'in-principle' argument. In essence, they try to deflect concern about (i) by speculating that other WM tasks would have produced similar results, implying that there should be little concern about their choice of memory measures. Putting aside serious concerns about whether memory tasks are so interchangeable (and the unaddressed fact that the n-back and serial-recall tasks are not WM tasks; see Kane et al. 2004), this still leaves unanswered the question of how the magnitude of acceptability contrasts tied to resource limitations relates to memory measures. In other words, it is premature to argue about whether all memory tasks relate in the same way to judgments for hard-to-process structures if we do not know that ANY memory measure systematically predicts acceptability judgments for such structures! The relevance of (ii) to this issue is not merely a theoretical concern, either. In practice, both HSS and SWP have independently validated objection (ii). In HSS, we showed that perhaps the most widely used WM measure, the reading span, fails to predict variation in judgments for extremely hard-to-process sentences (see also Waters & Caplan 1996), even though they predict variation for 'moderately' difficult items. Indeed, both SWP1 and SWP2 fail to mention their finding that judgments for the poster child of grammatical, hard-to-process structures—multiple center-embeddings—were, in fact, higher for individuals with LOWER MEMORY SCORES on their tests (Sprouse 2009), contrary to the hypothesis that higher scores should equate to higher acceptability judgments for sentences that stress WM resources. This evidence belies SWP2's claim that 'the naturalness or discourse felicity of our materials have little to [End Page 408] do with the debate' (p. 402), since in any investigation of individual differences, the nature of the test materials matters. For example, if the materials universally cause computational breakdown, then individual differences will be inconsequential. What we can say for certain on the basis of this evidence is that there is no known UNIVERSALLY APPLICABLE way in which memory measures relate to acceptability judgments. Beyond this, we are faced with a stark example of the conclusions we would be forced to draw if we accepted SWP's logic: if a failure to find a correlation between WM measures and acceptability decrements is evidence that grammatical constraints—and not processing constraints—underlie a contrast, then both HSS and SWP have 'evidence' that multiple center-embeddings are ruled out by grammar and not by processing. In light of this reductio, we conclude that there is simply nothing new to be learned from either SWP1 or SWP2 about how grammatical constraints and processing factors like WM limitations interact in the processing of island structures.2 Their conclusions that processing...

Journal of Linguistics has as its goal to publish articles that make a clear contribution to current debate in all branches of theoretical linguistics.

Journal of Linguistics has as its goal to publish articles that make a clear contribution to current debate in all branches of theoretical linguistics.

Sluicing is widely regarded as requiring an analysis via deletion operations, a potentially problematic conclusion for non-transformational frameworks like HPSG. We examine critically and reassess the motivation for a deletion analysis of Sluicing, offering cross-linguistic and language-internal evidence in support of a fundamentally semantic constructional alternative like the one proposed by Ginzburg and Sag (2000).

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Competence and Performance Contemporary Psycholinguistics Constraint-Based Grammar CBL Grammars and Sentence Processing A Minimalist Alternative Conclusions References

Linguists build theories of grammar based largely on acceptability contrasts. But these contrasts can reflect grammatical constraints and/or constraints on language processing. How can theorists determine the extent to which the acceptability of an utterance depends on functional constraints? In a series of acceptability experiments, we consider two factors that might indicate processing contributions to acceptability contrasts: (1) the way constraints combine (i.e., additively or super-additively), and (2) the way a comprehender's working memory resources influence acceptability judgments. Results suggest that multiple sources of processing difficulty combine to produce super -additive effects, but multiple grammatical violations do not. Furthermore, when acceptability judgments improve with higher working memory scores, this appears to be due to functional constraints. We conclude that tests of (super)-additivity and of differences in working memory can help to identify the effects of processing difficulty (due to functional constraints).