Extraction from relative and embedded interrogative clauses in Danish

Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2011. Editors: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Gunta Nešpore and Inguna Skadiņa. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 11 (2011), 42-49. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/16955

Recent Advances in Research on Island Phenomena

In natural languages, filler-gap dependencies can straddle across an unbounded distance. Since the 1960s, the term “island” has been used to describe syntactic structures from which extraction is impossible or impeded. While examples from English are ubiquitous, attested counterexamples in the Mainland Scandinavian languages have continuously been dismissed as illusory and alternative accounts for the underlying structure of such cases have been proposed. However, since such extractions are pervasive in spoken Mainland Scandinavian, these languages may not have been given the attention that they deserve in the syntax literature. In addition, recent research suggests that extraction from certain types of island structures in English might not be as unacceptable as previously assumed either. These findings break new empirical ground, question perceived knowledge, and may indeed have substantial ramifications for syntactic theory. This volume provides an overview of state-of-the-art research on island phenomena primarily in English and the Scandinavian languages, focusing on how languages compare to English, with the aim to shed new light on the nature of island constraints from different theoretical perspectives

A constraint-based view

Synopsis: This book is an introduction to the syntactic structures that can be found in the Germanic languages. The analyses are couched in the framework of HPSG light, which is a simplified version of HPSG that uses trees to depict analyses rather than complicated attribute value matrices. The book is written for students with basic knowledge about case, constituent tests, and simple phrase structure grammars (advanced BA or MA level) and for researchers with an interest in the Germanic languages and/or an interest in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar/Sign-Based Construction Grammar without having the time to deal with all the details of these theories

The distribution of main and embedded structures: V2 and non-V2 orders in North Germanic

North Germanic has Verb Second (V2) word order in main but not embedded clauses. Although as a first approximation V2 is a phenomenon characteristic of root clauses, it has long been known that it occurs also in a restricted set of embedded clauses in many, if not all, of the North Germanic languages. Moreover, a wide variety of Norwegian dialects allow deviations from the standard V2 word order in main clause interrogatives. The asymmetric Verb Second pattern thus seemingly breaks down in different ways. This thesis presents new data from large-scale elicited production experiments targeting the placement of the finite verb in both main and embedded clauses. The distribution of deviations from the standard word order pattern, and the constraints on the environments where these are produced are of primary concern. In addition, results from a Norwegian production experiment where speech was elicited in two ways -- using standardised written language and using spoken dialect as the elicitation source, show that most speakers directly activate morphophonological forms from the local dialect when encountering standardised orthographic forms. This suggests that speakers do not treat the written and spoken language as different grammars. Furthermore, we find syntactic variation which does not track the morphophonological variation, suggesting that a code/register-switching alone cannot explain syntactic optionality. Overall, the results of the various studies within this thesis show that variation in the position of the verb, is found not only between languages, but within languages and within speakers. I therefore conclude that verb placement in North Germanic is not fully grammaticised. As an alternative, this thesis proposes a uniform syntactic structure for main and embedded clauses in North Germanic. In this structure, verb position is non-categorical though correlated with assertion semantics (embedded clauses) and prosody and lexicon (Norwegian main clauses)

Possessor Extraction in English and Danish

Both English and Danish are Germanic languages which are said to require pied-piping of possessive phrases when they are moved, for example in questions like Whose computer do you think this is? If pied-piping is not required in such movements, an alternative way of asking the same question could be Who do you think’s computer this is? (or perhaps, for Danish readers, Hvem er dets computer? [Who is it’s computer?] might be acceptable), where the possessor who/hvem has been extracted from the possessive phrase whose computer/hvis computer, leaving the rest of the possessive DP material -’s/-s computer behind. This type of movement is called possessor extraction (PE), and Davis (2021) provides evidence for the possibility of it in colloquial English for some speakers. This article is a pilot study of Danish PE, suggesting initial generalizations and comparing these to Davis’s (2021) generalizations about English PE

Remarks on Acceptability and Grammaticality

In the present paper a distinction is drawn between acceptability and grammaticality. These two concepts have often been confounded in the literature. Thus linguists have been prone to say that 'the native speaker makes grammaticality judgments'. Nothing could be more mistaken. He makes acceptability judgments, and that is something entirely different. In this article, I shall make use of the sentence-schema which has been current since Chomsky (1986a) - a logical extension of X-bar syntax. Readers who are not familiar with the basic modules of modern TG-theory are referred to my articles in Hermes, 1 and Hermes, 2 (see references). In these two articles I adhered to the S-bar/S-schema of sentence structure. This is now obsolete. I shall adopt a relatively conservative view of bounding nodes (subjacency); i.e. I make no attempt to introduce the sophisticated theory of barrierhood developed in Chomsky (1986a). This is immaterial to the argument conducted in this paper

Cognitive constraints and island effects

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that nonstructural manipulations that leave island structures intact can radically alter judgments of island violations. We argue here, building on work by Paul Deane, Robert Kluender, and others, that processing factors have the potential to account for this otherwise unexplained variation in acceptability judgments. We report the results of self-paced reading experiments and controlled acceptability studies that explore the relationship between processing costs and judgments of acceptability. In each of the three self-paced reading studies, the data indicate that the processing cost of different types of island violations can be significantly reduced to a degree comparable to that of nonisland filler-gap constructions by manipulating a single nonstructural factor. Moreover, this reduction in processing cost is accompanied by significant improvements in acceptability. This evidence favors the hypothesis that island-violating constructions involve numerous processing pressures that aggregate to drive processing difficulty above a threshold, resulting in unacceptability. We examine the implications of these findings for the grammar of filler-gap dependencies