Cross-linguistic Variation in a Processing Account: The Case of Multiple Wh-questions∗

0. Introduction The distinction between acceptable and unacceptable sentences has long served as the empirical basis for theoretical linguistics. Traditionally, two kinds of explanations have been offered to account for perceived unacceptability. In the first, unacceptability reflects the violation of grammatical constraints. The second explanation attributes unacceptability to processing complexity: a construction is judged unacceptable because it is hard to process. The unacceptability of nested constructions like (1) has been attributed to their extreme processing complexity (Gibson 2000; Miller & Chomsky 1963). The acceptability of this construction improves when the processing load is reduced by replacing the lexical NPs with pronouns, as in (2).

[1]  G. A. Miller,et al.  Finitary models of language users , 1963 .

[2]  Eugene Galanter,et al.  Handbook of mathematical psychology: I. , 1963 .

[3]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  Conditions on transformations , 1971 .

[4]  D. Bolinger.  Asking More Than One Thing at a Time , 1978 .

[5]  Brian MacWhinney,et al.  Toward a Psycholinguistically Plausible Parser , 1986 .

[6]  C. Rudin.  On multiple questions and multiple WH fronting , 1988 .

[7]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing. , 1992 .

[8]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  Processing A Language without Inflections: A Reaction Time Study of Sentence Interpretation in Chinese , 1993 .

[9]  Uli Lutz.  Some Notes on Extraction Theory , 1996 .

[10]  Frank Keller,et al.  How Do Humans Deal with Ungrammatical Input? Experimental Evidence and Computational Modelling , 1996, KONVENS.

[11]  J. Zwart.  The Minimalist Program , 1998, Journal of Linguistics.

[12]  Robert Kluender,et al.  On the distinction between strong and weak islands: a processing perspective , 1998 .

[13]  Brian MacWhinney,et al.  Processing of Morphological and Semantic Cues in Russian and German. , 1999 .

[14]  Y. Miyashita,et al.  Image, language, brain , 2000 .

[15]  E. Gibson.  The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. , 2000 .

[16]  D. Pesetsky.  Phrasal Movement and Its Kin , 2000 .

[17]  Wilbert Spooren,et al.  Text representation : linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects , 2001 .

[18]  P. Boersma,et al.  Empirical Tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm , 2001, Linguistic Inquiry.

[19]  Mira Ariel.  Accessibility theory: An overview , 2001 .

[20]  Igor Boguslavsky,et al.  Development of a Dependency Treebank for Russian and its Possible Applications in NLP , 2002, LREC.

[21]  Lyn Frazier,et al.  Processing “d-Linked” Phrases , 2002, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[22]  Tessa C. Warren,et al.  The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity , 2002, Cognition.

[23]  Robert Kluender,et al.  Are Subject Islands Subject to a Processing Account , 2004 .

[24]  Gisbert Fanselow,et al.  Effects of Processing Difficulty on Judgments of Acceptability , 2004 .

[25]  Sam Featherston,et al.  Universals and grammaticality: wh-constraints in German and English , 2005 .

[26]  C. Clifton,et al.  Amnestying Superiority Violations: Processing Multiple Questions , 2006, Linguistic Inquiry.

[27]  I. Sag,et al.  Locality and Accessibility in Wh-Questions , 2007 .