A verb-frame frequency account of constraints on long-distance dependencies in English
Name
Liu et al sept 2021.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
6.56 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
0affacadd12498016ae0ac8605859a29
Author(s)
Liu, Yingtong
Ryskin, Rachel
Futrell, Richard
Gibson, Edward A
Date Issued
September 2021
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Liu, Yingtong, Ryskin, Rachel, Futrell, Richard and Gibson, Edward. 2021. "A verb-frame frequency account of constraints on long-distance dependencies in English." Cognition.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Going back to Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973), researchers have sought to understand what conditions permit long-distance dependencies in language, such as between the wh-word what and the verb bought in the sentence 'What did John think that Mary bought?'. In the present work, we attempt to understand why changing the main verb in wh-questions affects the acceptability of long-distance dependencies out of embedded clauses. In particular, it has been claimed that factive and manner-of-speaking verbs block such dependencies (e.g., 'What did John know/whisper that Mary bought?'), whereas verbs like think and believe allow them. Here we provide 3 acceptability judgment experiments of filler-gap constructions across embedded clauses to evaluate four types of accounts based on (1) discourse; (2) syntax; (3) semantics; and (4) our proposal related to verb-frame frequency. The patterns of acceptability are most simply explained by two factors: verb-frame frequency, such that dependencies with verbs that rarely take embedded clauses are less acceptable; and construction type, such that wh-questions and clefts are less acceptable than declaratives. We conclude that the low acceptability of filler-gap constructions formed by certain sentence complement verbs is due to infrequent linguistic exposure.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104902
