DOCSLIB.ORG

1 English Subjectless Tagged Sentences Paul Kay Department Of

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text

Load more

1 English subjectless tagged sentences Paul Kay Department of Linguistics University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 [email protected] 2 Abstract A colloquial English sentence like Fooled us, didn't they? contains a finite main verb but no expressed subject. The identity of the missing subject of fooled is recovered from the tag subject they: compare Fooled us, didn't she?, Fooled us, didn't you? This paper argues (1) that such subjectless tagged sentences (STSs) pose a problem for grammatical approaches based on movement and empty categories and (2) that STSs receive a revealing analysis as part of a finely articulated family of tagged sentence constructions when viewed within a non-derivational, constructional, multiple-inheritance-based approach.* *I would like to thank Peter Culicover, Liliane Haegeman, Charles Fillmore Andreas Kathol and Richard Oehrle for comments on previous versions of this paper, as well as an anonymous reviewer for Language. They have doubtless offered more good advice than I have accepted. 3 0. Introduction. It has been argued from several points of view that whatever can be done with empty categories (ecs) can be done without them (Ades and Steedman 1982, Gazdar et al. 1984, Kaplan and Zaenen 1989, Pollard and Sag 1994 chapter 9, Sag and Fodor 1994, Kay and Fillmore 1999, Sag 1999). It has also been argued that, because there is no hard evidence for their existence, linguistic theory would be better off dispensing with these unobservable entities (Pickering and Barry 1991, Sag and Fodor 1994, Sag 1999).1 The present paper purports to take the argument one step further by showing that there are things that can be done without empty categories that cannot be done with them, at least not with any of the ecs currently available. Examples 1a,b exemplify one such phenomenon. (1) a. Fooled us, didn't they/she. b. Fooled them, didn't we/he?2 c. Fooled you! [Interpretation: 'Fooled you, didn't I!'] d. Fooled me! [Interpretation: 'Fooled me, didn't you!'] The absence of an overt subject in the main clause of 1a, b does not appear to yield naturally to an analysis in terms of any of the types of empty categories and principles for their licensing and identification so far proposed in the extended GB (EGB) tradition.3 Moreover, sentences of this kind are readily given an analysis that reveals their close kinship to other tagged sentences in a monostratal approach that countenances neither empty categories nor movement and which relies on multiple constructional inheritance to capture syntactic and semantic generalizations (Fillmore 1998, Kay and Fillmore 1999, Koenig 1999, Michaelis and Lambrecht 1996, Kay 1998, Sag 1997, Ginzburg and Sag to appear). Initial facts to be noticed about the sentences in 1 include the following. Whereas in some (untagged) sentences of spoken English subjects may be left unexpressed (because they are recoverable from context) as in 1c,d, missing subjects in English main clauses are not generally possible unless the referent of the subject is identified via a tag, as in 1a, b. The necessity of the tag to identify the subject in sentences of this type is crucial. When a sentence of this kind is uttered, varying the tag subject will result in the expression of distinct propositions in a fixed context. Suppose you and I are teammates and our team has just lost a game. I may say any of 2a, b, c, expressing distinct propositions depending on my choice. (2) a. Blew it, didn't you. b. Blew it, didn't I. c. Blew it, didn't we. The context alone is not sufficient to identify the party the speaker blames for the loss; the addressee can not determine who this is until until the tag subject is uttered. In the case of 2c, if in the context of utterance the team of which you and I are members contains others, then the vagueness of we, which may or may not include the addressee and independently may or may not include third parties (Nunberg 1993), carries over to the interpretation of the proposition expressed. Whatever group of players we picks out constitutes the party blamed for the loss by an utterance of 2c.4 4 In the next section, we consider the range of descriptive variants of what I will call the Subjectless Tagged Sentence (STS) construction and engage in a preliminary, informal investigation of the implications of STS for the EGB approach. In section 2 an alternative hypothesis, VP Fronting, is considered and rejected. The name STS presupposes that the second clause of sentences like 1a, b and 2a, b, c is in fact a tag. (I will refer to the first and second clauses of sentences ending in tag questions as host and tag, respectively.) According to this hypothesis the host is analyzed as a fronted predicational phrase and what looks like a tag is really a main clause missing a fronted VP or other predicational phrase. As part of this discussion, data on various types of tagged sentences that do not lack host subjects are introduced and a preliminary examination of their relation to the corresponding STS structures is undertaken. Section 3 is concerned with problems in representing the missing subject of STSs in the EGB tradition. Interpretation of the host subject in examples such as 3 appears to be made, cataphorically, via interpretation of the tag subject. (3) a. Ready on time, wasn't I? b. Ready on time, weren't you? c. Ready on time, wasn't he/she/it? d. Ready on time, weren't we? e. Ready on time, weren't they? Thus, if one supposes the host subject to be represented by an empty category, the tag subject must be coindexed with this ec. But the tag subject can't bind the host subject because the former doesn't c-command the latter. So there appears to be no EGB alternative to the host (null) subject's finding its antecedent in the context and the tag subject's depending referentially on it. Identifying the host subject from context, within the EGB framework, will turn out to pose a problem. In section 4, a constructional analysis of STS is presented within a general analysis of tag questions, formalizing the data presented in section 2. Relationships among the various sentence types ending in tag questions, with and without main clause subjects, are represented in a multiple inheritance hierarchy. The guiding intuition in this analysis is that most of the grammatical matching between a tag and its host results automatically from semantic identity at an appropriate level. Section 5 is devoted to the question of so-called embedded tags, as exemplified in 4a (Cf. 4b). (4) a. I think the dog ate the pizza, didn't he? b. You think the dog ate the pizza, don't you? It is argued there, following the main lines of Hooper and Thompson (1991), that in a sentence like 4a, instead of regarding the tag as embedded it is preferable to recognize that the principal assertion conveyed by 4a is that the dog ate the pizza (not that the speaker had a particular thought) and to analyze the tag as agreeing with this conveyed proposition. Section 6 presents a summary and conclusions. 5 1. Descriptive variants of the STS construction. All the variants of STS contain a host clause (or saturated predicate phrase) and a tag. The host can be thought of initially as an ordinary Subject-Predicate sentence missing either (a) only the subject, if the finite verb isn't be or (b) the subject and the finite verb if the latter is be. The tag is an appropriate question tag for the 'restored' host sentence. Descriptively, we can identify four subtypes of STSs. The first type has a tensed main verb in the host and support do in the tag. See (1a), repeated. (1) a. Fooled us, didn't they. In the second type the host contains a tensed auxiliary which is repeated in the tag, possibly with further repeated non-finite auxiliaries.5 (5) a. Wouldn't have been caught dead in there, would she have been? b. Wouldn't have been caught dead in there, would she have? c. Wouldn't have been caught dead in there, would she? In the third type of STS the host contains a non-verbal predicate and finite be occurs in the tag. (6) a. (A) nice guy, isn't he? b. A little too spicy for the kids, were they? c. Behind the arras, wasn't he. The fourth descriptive type of STS has a non-finite verb in the host which is an appropriate complement for the tag auxiliary. (7) a. Resting peacefully now, are they? b. Been seeing more of him, has she? 2. An alternative analysis. We have been assuming that the part of an STS (as in 5- 7) that looks like a tag is a tag, in fact a question tag. But, as suggested in the introduction, has she in 7b, for example, could be the remnant of something like VP Fronting.6 If STS examples like 5-7 can be analyzed as a form of VPF, there is no problem accounting for the missing host subject in EGB terms. It is therefore important to the argument of this paper that the VPF possibility be eliminated. A VPF analysis of STS along the following lines would eliminate the problem of licensing the null subject of the host. Assume VPF consists in movement of VP to [Spec, CP]. If movement of the subject to [Spec, IP] from [Spec, VP] occurs before VPF, a trace of the subject will remain in [Spec, VP].
Recommended publications
  • A Type-Theoretical Analysis of Complex Verb Generation

    A Type-Theoretical Analysis of Complex Verb Generation

    A Type-theoretical Analysis of Complex Verb Generation Satoshi Tojo Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc. 2-22 Harumi 3, Chuo-ku Tokyo 104, Japan e-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Abstract hardly find a verb element in the target language, which corresponds with the original word exactly in Tense and aspect, together with mood and modality, meaning. However we also need to admit that the usually form the entangled structure of a complex verb. problem of knowledge representation of tense and as- They are often hard to translate by machines, because pect (namely time), or that of mood and modality is of both syntactic and semantic differences between lan- not only the problem of verb translation, but that of guages. This problem seriously affects upon the gen- the whole natural language understanding. In this pa- eration process because those verb components in in- per, in order to realize a type calculus in syntax, we terlingua are hardly rearranged correctly in the target depart from a rather mundane subset of tense, aspects, language. We propose here a method in which each and modMities, which will be argued in section 2. verb element is defined as a mathematical function ac- cording to its type of type theory. This formalism gives 1.2 The difference in the structure each element its legal position in the complex verb in the target language and certifies so-called partial trans- In the Japanese translation of (1): lation. In addition, the generation algorithm is totally oyoi-de-i-ta-rashii free from the stepwise calculation, and is available on parallel architecture.
  • Development of a General-Purpose Categorial Grammar Treebank

    Development of a General-Purpose Categorial Grammar Treebank

    Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 5195–5201 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC Development of a General-Purpose Categorial Grammar Treebank Yusuke Kubota, Koji Mineshima, Noritsugu Hayashi, Shinya Okano NINJAL, Ochanomizu University, The University of Tokyo, idem. f10-2 Midori-cho, Tachikawa; 2-2-1 Otsuka, Bunkyo; 3-8-1 Komaba, Megurog, Tokyo, Japan [email protected], [email protected], fhayashi, [email protected] Abstract This paper introduces ABC Treebank, a general-purpose categorial grammar (CG) treebank for Japanese. It is ‘general-purpose’ in the sense that it is not tailored to a specific variant of CG, but rather aims to offer a theory-neutral linguistic resource (as much as possible) which can be converted to different versions of CG (specifically, CCG and Type-Logical Grammar) relatively easily. In terms of linguistic analysis, it improves over the existing Japanese CG treebank (Japanese CCGBank) on the treatment of certain linguistic phenomena (passives, causatives, and control/raising predicates) for which the lexical specification of the syntactic information reflecting local dependencies turns out to be crucial. In this paper, we describe the underlying ‘theory’ dubbed ABC Grammar that is taken as a basis for our treebank, outline the general construction of the corpus, and report on some preliminary results applying the treebank in a semantic parsing system for generating logical representations of sentences. Keywords: treebank, categorial grammar, Japanese, annotation 1. Introduction Table 1: Comparison with related work original corpus output This paper reports on the progress of the construction of a H&S Penn Treebank English CCG general-purpose categorial grammar treebank in Japanese Uematsu et al.
  • Direct Compositionality and Variable-Free Semantics: the Case of “Principle B”

    Direct Compositionality and Variable-Free Semantics: the Case of “Principle B”

    Direct Compositionality and Variable-Free Semantics: The Case of “Principle B” Drafty outline/handout of material to be presented at the Workshop on Direct Compositionality Pauline Jacobson Brown University 0. The big picture goals: (A) To argue that direct compositionality is a much simpler hypothesis about the organization of the grammar than the competing views It is, therefore, the view we should hope is correct. Apparent challenges to this view should perhaps lead us to rethink some of the underlying assumptions which give rise to these challenges. (B) To point out: a consequence of at least a reasonably strong version of direct compositionality is that structured representations (e.g., trees) play no actual role in the grammar: they are not something that grammatical rules/principles can “see”. They are just convenient representation for the lnguist (representing the syntactic proof system and the compositional semantics) (C) To point out the consequences of this with respect to principles regarding the distribution of pronouns (reflexives, etc.). Standard assumption: these require the grammar to include principles which are stated on non strictly-local chucks of representation Hence: the hypothesis of direct compositionality should inspire us to rethink such statements (D) To discuss a second way in which binding principles have traditionally been taken to challenge direct compositionality (at least in its strong form): • there are many cases where there are binding type effects (e.g., "binding" of pronouns, "binding" of reflexives to satisfy Principle A, Principle B violations, etc.) but where on the surface, there is no big enough chunk of representation Typical example : connectivity in specificational sentences (1) What John is is proud of himself.
  • Chapter 1 Negation in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

    Chapter 1 Negation in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

    Chapter 1 Negation in a cross-linguistic perspective 0. Chapter summary This chapter introduces the empirical scope of our study on the expression and interpretation of negation in natural language. We start with some background notions on negation in logic and language, and continue with a discussion of more linguistic issues concerning negation at the syntax-semantics interface. We zoom in on cross- linguistic variation, both in a synchronic perspective (typology) and in a diachronic perspective (language change). Besides expressions of propositional negation, this book analyzes the form and interpretation of indefinites in the scope of negation. This raises the issue of negative polarity and its relation to negative concord. We present the main facts, criteria, and proposals developed in the literature on this topic. The chapter closes with an overview of the book. We use Optimality Theory to account for the syntax and semantics of negation in a cross-linguistic perspective. This theoretical framework is introduced in Chapter 2. 1 Negation in logic and language The main aim of this book is to provide an account of the patterns of negation we find in natural language. The expression and interpretation of negation in natural language has long fascinated philosophers, logicians, and linguists. Horn’s (1989) Natural history of negation opens with the following statement: “All human systems of communication contain a representation of negation. No animal communication system includes negative utterances, and consequently, none possesses a means for assigning truth value, for lying, for irony, or for coping with false or contradictory statements.” A bit further on the first page, Horn states: “Despite the simplicity of the one-place connective of propositional logic ( ¬p is true if and only if p is not true) and of the laws of inference in which it participate (e.g.
  • Sequence-Of-Tense and the Features of Finite Tenses Karen Zagona University of Washington*

    Sequence-Of-Tense and the Features of Finite Tenses Karen Zagona University of Washington*

    Sequence-of-tense and the Features of Finite Tenses Karen Zagona University of Washington* Abstract Sequence-of-tense (SOT) is often described as a (past) tense verb form that does not correspond to a semantically interpretable tense. Since SOT clauses behave in other respects like finite clauses, the question arises as to whether the syntactic category Tense has to be distinguished from the functional category tense. I claim that SOT clauses do in fact contain interpretable PRESENT tense. The “past” form is analyzed as a manifestation of agreement with the (matrix past) controller of the SOT clause evaluation time. One implication of this analysis is that finite verb forms should be analyzed as representing features that correspond to functional categories higher in clause structure, including those of the clausal left periphery. SOT morphology then sheds light on the existence of a series of finer- grained functional heads that contribute to tense construal, and to verbal paradigms. These include Tense, Modality and Force. 1. Introduction The phenomenon of sequence-of-tense (SOT) poses several challenges for the standard assumption that a “past tense” verb form signals the presence of a functional category in clause structure with an interpretable ‘past’ value. SOT is illustrated by the ‘simultaneous’ reading of sentence (1): (1) Terry believed that Sue was pregnant. a. The time of Sue’s pregnancy precedes time of Terry’s belief (precedence) b. The time of Sue’ pregnancy overlaps time of Terry’s belief (simultaneity) For the ‘precedence’ reading in (1a), the embedded clause tense is semantically transparent in the sense that the past form was corresponds to a past ordering relation (relative to the time of Terry’s belief).
  • Topic Structures in Chinese Author(S): Xu Liejiong and D

    Topic Structures in Chinese Author(S): Xu Liejiong and D

    Linguistic Society of America Topic Structures in Chinese Author(s): Xu Liejiong and D. Terence Langendoen Source: Language, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 1-27 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413419 Accessed: 11/05/2009 22:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=lsa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language. http://www.jstor.org TOPIC STRUCTURES IN CHINESE Xu LIEJIONG D.
  • Empty Categories in LFG

    Empty Categories in LFG

    Empty categories in LFG Judith Berman University of Stuttgart Pro ceedings of the LFG Conference University of California San Diego Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King Editors CSLI Publications httpwwwcslistanfordedupublications I am grateful to Christian Fortmann Gert Web elhuth Hub ert Haider Joan Bresnan Miriam Butt Steve Berman and Werner Frey for helpful comments and discussion This researchwas supp orted by the DFG Graduiertenkolleg Linguistische Grundlagen fur die Sprachverarb eitung at the University of Stuttgart LFG JBerman Empty Categories in LFG This pap er is concerned with the question whether there is any necessity and evidence for empty categories sp ecically traces in German Following the analysis of weak crossover in Bresnan b and Choi it is shown that the German weak crossover data can b e captured correctly if it is assumed that a topicalized constituent has to b e linked with an empty category in its lo cal domain its minimal clause only in the case of long distance dep endencies The empty category is indep endently motivated by a lo cality requirement on function sp ecication which is empirically supp orted by the fact that free word order in German is restricted to the lo cal clause It is further shown that the empty category cannot o ccupy the canonical p osition of the antecedent Instead it is claimed based on work byFrey that the sp ecier p osition of the functional category is the only p osition in which the empty category is licensed The resulting analysis not only accounts for the weak crossover data
  • Categorial Grammar and Lexical-Functional Grammar∗

    Categorial Grammar and Lexical-Functional Grammar∗

    Categorial Grammar and Lexical-Functional Grammar¤ Reinhard Muskens Department of Linguistics Tilburg University The Netherlands Proceedings of the LFG01 Conference University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (Editors) 2001 CSLI Publications http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/ ¤I wish to thank the participants of LFG2001, especially Mary Dalrymple and Ron Kaplan, for valuable feedback. All comments are very welcome. Abstract This paper introduces ¸-grammar, a form of categorial grammar that has much in common with LFG. Like other forms of categorial grammar, ¸-grammars are multi-dimensional and their components are combined in a strictly parallel fashion. Grammatical representa- tions are combined with the help of linear combinators, closed pure ¸-terms in which each abstractor binds exactly one variable. Mathe- matically this is equivalent to employing linear logic, in use in LFG for semantic composition, but the method seems more practicable. While ¸-grammars could be used to formalize many approaches to grammatical theory, they are certainly natural as a basis for the formalization of LFG. This leads to a theory I would like to call ¸- LFG. In this paper it will be shown how the standard components of LFG can be set up in the framework. We will have descriptions of c-structure, descriptions of f-structure, and semantics. The di®erence between de¯ning and constraining information will be explained in terms of entailment, and requirements on long-distance paths in f- structure will be explained in terms of entailment in the presence of a simple set of axioms. 1 Introduction In this paper I want to discuss a version of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) that is also a version of Categorial Grammar (CG).
  • The Categorial Fine-Structure of Natural Language

    The Categorial Fine-Structure of Natural Language

    1 The categorial fine-structure of natural language Johan van Benthem, Amsterdam & Stanford, March 2003 Abstract Categorial grammar analyzes linguistic syntax and semantics in terms of type theory and lambda calculus. A major attraction of this approach is its unifying power, as its basic function/ argument structures occur across the foundations of mathematics, language and computation. This paper considers, in a light example-based manner, where this elegant logical paradigm stands when confronted with the wear and tear of reality. Starting from a brief history of the Lambek tradition since the 1980s, we discuss three main issues: (a) the fit of the lambda calculus engine to characte- ristic semantic structures in natural language, (b) coexistence of the original type-theoretic and more recent modal interpretations of categorial logics, and (c) the place of categorial grammars in the total architecture of natural language, which involves mixtures of interpretation and inference. 1 From Montague Grammar to Categorial Grammar Logic and linguistics have had lively connections from Antiquity right until today (GAMUT 1991). A recurrent theme in this history is the categorial structure of language and ontology, from Aristotle's grammatical categories to Russell's theory of types in the foundations of mathematics. Further bridges were thrown as logic and linguistics developed, with Lambek 1958 as a major advance in sophistication, many years ahead of its time. Large-scale logical analysis of natural language really took off around 1970, thanks to Montague's work (Montague 1975, Partee 1997). This system connects linguistic structure and logical semantics in the following architecture. The pivotal deep structure are syntax trees formed by grammatical construction rules.
  • Chapter 3 Language Analysis and Understanding

    Chapter 3 Language Analysis and Understanding

    Chapter 3 Language Analysis and Understanding 3.1 Overview a b Annie Zaenen & Hans Uszkoreit a Rank Xerox ResearchCentre, Grenoble, France b Deutsches Forschungszentrum fur Kunstlic he Intelligenz and Universitat des Saarlandes, Saarbruc ken, Germany We understand larger textual units bycombining our understanding of smaller ones. The main aim of linguistic theory is to showhow these larger units of meaning arise out of the combination of the smaller ones. This is mo deled by means of a grammar. Computational linguistics then tries to implement this pro cess in an ecientway.Itis traditional to sub divide the task into syntax and semantics, where syntax describ es how the di erent formal elements of a textual unit, most often the sentence, can b e combined and semantics describ es how the interpretation is calculated. In most language technology applications the enco ded linguistic knowledge, i.e., the grammar, is separated from the pro cessing comp onents. The grammar consists of a lexicon, and rules that syntactically and semantically combine words and phrases into larger phrases and sentences. A variety of representation languages have b een develop ed for the enco ding of linguistic knowledge. Some of these languages are more geared towards conformity with formal linguistic theories, others are designed to facilitate certain pro cessing mo dels or sp ecialized applications. Several language technology pro ducts that are on the market to day employ annotated 109 110 Chapter 3: Language Analysis and Understanding phrase-structure grammars, grammars with several hundreds or thousands of rules describing di erent phrase typ es. Each of these rules is annotated by features and sometimes also by expressions in a programming language.
  • The Logic of Categorial Grammars: Lecture Notes Christian Retoré

    The Logic of Categorial Grammars: Lecture Notes Christian Retoré

    The Logic of Categorial Grammars: Lecture Notes Christian Retoré To cite this version: Christian Retoré. The Logic of Categorial Grammars: Lecture Notes. RR-5703, INRIA. 2005, pp.105. inria-00070313 HAL Id: inria-00070313 https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00070313 Submitted on 19 May 2006 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. INSTITUT NATIONAL DE RECHERCHE EN INFORMATIQUE ET EN AUTOMATIQUE The Logic of Categorial Grammars Lecture Notes Christian Retoré N° 5703 Septembre 2005 Thème SYM apport de recherche ISRN INRIA/RR--5703--FR+ENG ISSN 0249-6399 The Logic of Categorial Grammars Lecture Notes Christian Retoré ∗ Thème SYM — Systèmes symboliques Projet Signes Rapport de recherche n° 5703 — Septembre 2005 —105 pages Abstract: These lecture notes present categorial grammars as deductive systems, and include detailed proofs of their main properties. The first chapter deals with Ajdukiewicz and Bar-Hillel categorial grammars (AB grammars), their relation to context-free grammars and their learning algorithms. The second chapter is devoted to the Lambek calculus as a deductive system; the weak equivalence with context free grammars is proved; we also define the mapping from a syntactic analysis to a higher-order logical formula, which describes the seman- tics of the parsed sentence.
  • An Experimental Approach to Linguistic Representation

    An Experimental Approach to Linguistic Representation

    BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2017), Page 1 of 61 doi:10.1017/S0140525X16002028, e282 An experimental approach to linguistic representation Holly P. Branigan Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, United Kingdom [email protected] http://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/holly-branigan Martin J. Pickering Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, United Kingdom [email protected] http://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/martin-pickering Abstract: Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability – whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists’ representational assumptions. We challenge this division of labor by arguing that structural priming provides an implicit method of investigating linguistic representations that should end the current reliance on acceptability judgments. Moreover, structural priming has now reached sufficient methodological maturity to provide substantial evidence about such representations. We argue that evidence from speakers’ tendency to repeat their own and others’ structural choices supports a linguistic architecture involving a single shallow level of syntax connected to a semantic level containing information about quantification, thematic relations, and information structure, as well as to a phonological level. Many of the linguistic distinctions often used to support complex (or multilevel) syntactic structure are instead captured by semantics; however, the syntactic level includes some specification of “missing” elements that are not realized at the phonological level.