A Pragmatic Account of Complexity in Definite Antecedent-Contained-Deletion Relative Clauses
| Autor: | Pauline Jacobson, Kyle Mahowald, Edward Gibson, Steven Piantadosi, Evelina Fedorenko, Peter Graff |
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| Rok vydání: | 2014 |
| Předmět: |
Linguistics and Language
Interpretation (logic) business.industry Object (grammar) Context (language use) Resolution (logic) computer.software_genre Noun phrase Antecedent-contained deletion Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) Null (SQL) Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence business computer Natural language processing Mathematics Relative clause |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Semantics. 32:579-618 |
| ISSN: | 1477-4593 0167-5133 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/jos/ffu006 |
| Popis: | Hackl, Koster-Hale & Varvoutis (2012; HKV) provide data that suggest that in a null context, antecedent-contained-deletion (ACD) relative clause structures modifying a quantified object noun phrase (NP; such as every doctor) are easier to process than those modifying a definite object NP (such as the doctor). HKV argue that this pattern of results supports a ‘quantifier-raising’ (QR) analysis of both ACD structures and quantified NPs in object position: under the account they advocate, both ACD resolution and quantified NPs in object position require movement of the object NP to a higher syntactic position. The processing advantage for quantified object NPs in ACD is hypothesized to derive from the fact that—at the point where ACD resolution must take place—the quantified NP has already undergone QR whereas this is not the case for definite NPs. Although in other work it is shown that HKV’s reading time analyses are flawed, such that the critical effects are not significant (Gibson et al. submitted), the effect in HKV’s acceptability rating is robust. But HKV’s interpretation is problematic. We present five experiments that provide evidence for an alternative, pragmatic, explanation for HKV’s observation. In particular, we argue that the low acceptability of the the / ACD condition is largely due to a strong pressure in the null context to use a competing form, by adding also or same. This pressure does not exist with quantified |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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