A Szintaktikai Lokalitás Minimalista Megközelítése: A szintaktikai lokalitási feltételekért felelős nyelvi alrendszerek munkamegosztásának vizsgálata = A Minimalist Approach to Syntactic Locality: A study of the division of labour of linguistic subsystems underlying syntactic locality effects

A projekt a szintaxis és az azzal érintkező grammatikai komponensek munkamegosztását vizsgálta a mozgatási és polaritás engedélyezési függőségekben jelentkező szintaktikai lokalitási hatások területén. A projektnek a generatív grammatika mai, Minimalista kutatási programjába illeszkedő radikális tézise szerint a természetes nyelvi szintaxis egyáltalán nem is tartalmaz külön lokalitási megszorítás(oka)t. Kimutattuk, hogy az általunk vizsgált, a szintaxisban jelentkező lokalitási hatások (i) a szintaktikai komputációs rendszer általános tulajdonságaiból, különösen a komputációs komplexitása minimalizálásának igényéből, valamint (ii) a szintaxis és a vele érintkező grammatikai alrendszerek munkamegosztásából fakadnak. A projekt olyan területeken vizsgálta a lokalitási hatások természetét, mint a főnévi kifejezések által képviselt szigetek, a szintaktikai fejmozgatás, a kvantorhatókör-értelmezés, a fókuszálás, a határozói módosítás, a mondatbeágyazás, a preszuppozíciós, a tagadó és a kérdő típusú gyenge szigetek, és egyes, a polaritásengedélyezésben szerepet játszó intervenciós hatások. A több nemzetközi együttműködést is kezdeményező kutatócsoport munkájának sikerességét a számos jelentős publikáció, köztük egy sor nemzetközi folyóiratcikk és nagy presztízsű nemzetközi kiadónál megjelenő könyvfejezet is jelzi. A kutatás keretében egy megvédett DSc értekezés és egy leadott PhD disszertáció is született, és egy további doktori disszertáció készül el még ebben az évben. | This project studied the division of labour between syntax and its interface subsystems in giving rise to some of the central syntactic locality properties of dependencies like movement and polarity licensing. Implementing the current Minimalist research program of transformational generative grammar, it explored the radical proposal that natural language syntax itself includes no special syntactic locality conditions per se. Instead, the locality effects under scrutiny are reduced to (i) the elementary properties of the syntactic computational system, including its quest to keep computational complexity to a minimum, which in turn subsumes its cyclic mapping to the interpretive systems of sound and meaning; and (ii) the division of labour between syntax and the interface subsystems, in particular, semantics and information structure. The topics investigated include the locality effects involved in noun phrase islands, syntactic head movement, quantifier scope interpretation, focusing, adverbial modification, clausal embedding, weak islands like presuppositional, negative, and wh-islands, and some apparent intervention effects in polarity licensing. The project established fruitful international co-operations, and its results have appeared in the form of a number of international journal and book chapter publications. The project has also yielded a completed PhD dissertation, a PhD thesis to be submitted later this year, and a DSc dissertation

Quantifier scope in sentence prosody? : A view from production

Logical scope interpretation and sentence prosody exhibit intricate, yet scarcely studied interrelations across a variety of languages and constructions. Despite these observable interrelations, it is not clear whether quantifier scope by itself is able to directly affect prosodic form. Information structure is a key potential confounding factor, as it appears to richly interact both with scope interpretation and with prosodic form. To address this complication, the current study investigates, based on data from Hungarian, whether quantifier scope is expressed prosodically if information structure is kept in check. A production experiment is presented that investigates grammatically scope ambiguous doubly quantified sentences with varied focus structures, while lacking a syntactically marked topic or focus. In contrast to the information structural manipulation, which is manifest in the analysis of the acoustic data, the results reveal no prosodic effect of quantifier scope, nor the interaction of scope with information structure. This finding casts doubt on the notion that logical scope can receive direct prosodic expression, and it indirectly corroborates the restrictive view instead that scope interpretation is encoded in prosody only in cases in which it is a free rider on information structure

What do speaker judgments tell us about theories of quantifier scope in German?

Radó J, Bott O. What do speaker judgments tell us about theories of quantifier scope in German? Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. 2018;3(1): 91

The "inquiring man" in the laboratory

(from the chapter) From a Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) perspective, the researcher`s effort to standardize the experimental situation inevitably results in a different `reality` for each research participant. Moreover, we cannot dismiss the possibility that subjects already have different attitudes, or personal constructs, about this situation upon entering it and these personal constructs affect their behavior. This questions the basic assumptions of quantitative research. If such attitudes are present then we must allow that they might have an influence on the results even in experiments that do not fail. The present study was intended to address this. It was designed to provide evidence that participants of a typical laboratory experiment do indeed have different personal constructs about the experimental situation, and that these different `realities` map onto different patterns of performance in the laboratory experiment. In our study 36 participants (13 female, 23 male, average age: 23.9 years, all sports students) completed first a typical biomechanical experiment, then a Repertory Grid interview that served to assess their personal construct systems. Cluster analysis of the Grid data was used to detect latent classes of similar element systems. These classes were then compared with respect to the participants` biomechanical performance. Additionally, participants` attitudes were elicited using the more established method of the Semantic Differential to provide an independent means of evaluating the adequacy of the Grid method. Our findings are completely in line with general PCP assumptions that each individual has his or her own personal constructs about the world and that these constructs influence his or her behavior. As this influence is different from person to person, the results of an experiment that involves a certain set of individuals cannot be expected to generalize to a different set or to the whole population. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (chapter

Information Structure Triggers: Effects on (De) Accentuation, Dislocation and Discourse Linking

Hartmann J, Radó J, Winkler S, eds. Information Structure Triggers: Effects on (De) Accentuation, Dislocation and Discourse Linking. Lingua. 2013;2013(136)

How to provide exactly one interpretation for each sentence, or what eye movements reveal about quantifier scope

Bott O, Radó J. How to provide exactly one interpretation for each sentence, or what eye movements reveal about quantifier scope. In: Featherston S, Winkler S, eds. The fruits of empirical linguistics. Vol. 1: Process. Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG]. Vol 101. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter; 2009: 25-46