The puzzling nuanced status of who free relative clauses in English: a follow-up to Patterson and Caponigro (2015)

This squib challenges Patterson & Caponigro's (2015, this journal) claim that there are few acceptable free relative clauses with who. We show that free relatives with who are generally acceptable when they are 'transparent' free relatives or complements of a copula, and add further nuance to their findings concerning how the degree of acceptability of free relatives with who varies according to positional factors

Challenges for a theory of islands: Abroader perspective on ambridge, pine, and lieven

Subjacency characterizes a set of phenomena whose acquisition must be explained by any proposal for human language learning. We take a broader perspective than previous responses to Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (2014), arguing that they have not shown that this UG principle is ‘redundant’ because their proposed alternative does not take into account firmly established constraints on A-bar dependencies. We illustrate a range of challenges for theories hoping to reduce subjacency to independently motivated, primarily nonsyntactic constraints: they must include a way to account for attested crosslinguistic variation in island effects, the cross-construction generality of island effects, and the effects of resumption and of wh-in-situ on island behavior

A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001-2010

The goal of the present study is to provide a direct comparison of the results of informal judgment collection methods with the results of formal judgment collection methods, as a first step in understanding the relative merits of each family of methods. Although previous studies have compared small samples of informal and formal results, this article presents the first large-scale comparison based on a random sample of phenomena from a leading theoretical journal (Linguistic Inquiry). We tested 296 data points from the approximately 1743 English data points that were published in Linguistic Inquiry between 2001 and 2010. We tested this sample with 936 naïve participants using three formal judgment tasks (magnitude estimation, 7-point Likert scale, and two-alternative forced-choice) and report five statistical analyses. The results suggest a convergence rate of 95% between informal and formal methods, with a margin of error of 5.3-5.8%. We discuss the implications of this convergence rate for the ongoing conversation about judgment collection methods, and lay out a set of questions for future research into syntactic methodology. © 2013 Elsevier B.V

A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001-2010

The goal of the present study is to provide a direct comparison of the results of informal judgment collection methods with the results of formal judgment collection methods, as a first step in understanding the relative merits of each family of methods. Although previous studies have compared small samples of informal and formal results, this article presents the first large-scale comparison based on a random sample of phenomena from a leading theoretical journal (Linguistic Inquiry). We tested 296 data points from the approximately 1743 English data points that were published in Linguistic Inquiry between 2001 and 2010. We tested this sample with 936 naïve participants using three formal judgment tasks (magnitude estimation, 7-point Likert scale, and two-alternative forced-choice) and report five statistical analyses. The results suggest a convergence rate of 95% between informal and formal methods, with a margin of error of 5.3-5.8%. We discuss the implications of this convergence rate for the ongoing conversation about judgment collection methods, and lay out a set of questions for future research into syntactic methodology. © 2013 Elsevier B.V