Theory And Experiment In Syntax

This book reflects on key questions of enduring interest on the nature of syntax, bringing together Grant Goodall’s previous publications and new work exploring how syntactic representations are structured and the affordances of experimental techniques in studying them. The volume sheds light on central issues in the theory of syntax while also elucidating the methods of data collection which inform them. Featuring Goodall’s previous studies of linguistic phenomena in English, Spanish, and Chinese, and complemented by a new introduction and material specific to this volume, the book is divided into four sections around fundamental strands of syntactic theory. The four parts explore the dimensionality of syntactic representations; the relationship between syntactic structure and predicate-argument structure; interactions between subjects and wh-phrases in questions; and more detailed investigations of wh-dependencies but from a more overtly experimental perspective. Taken together, the volume reinforces the connections between these different aspects of syntax by highlighting their respective roles in defining what syntactic objects look like and how the grammar operates on them. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars in linguistics, particularly those with an interest in syntax, psycholinguistics, and Romance linguistics.

This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to overcome the numerous obstacles to empirical investigation of children's language competence. They produce research results that are more reproducible and less likely to be dismissed as an artifact of improper experimental procedure. In the first section of the book, the authors examine the fundamental assumptions that guide research in this area; they present both a theory of linguistic competence and a model of language processing. In the following two sections, they discuss in detail their two experimental techniques.

This book investigates the syntax and usage of fragments (Morgan 1973), apparently subsentential utterances like "A coffee, please!" which fulfill the same communicative function as the corresponding full sentence "I'd like to have a coffee, please!". Even though such utterances are frequently used, they challenge the central role that has been attributed to the notion of sentence in linguistic theory, particularly from a semantic perspective. The first part of the book is dedicated to the syntactic analysis of fragments, which is investigated with experimental methods. Currently there are several competing theoretical analyses of fragments, which rely almost only on introspective data. The experiments presented in this book constitute a first systematic evaluation of some of their crucial predictions and, taken together, support an in situ ellipsis account of fragments, as has been suggested by Reich (2007). The second part of the book addresses the questions of why fragments are used at all, and under which circumstances they are preferred over complete sentences. Syntactic accounts impose licensing conditions on fragments, but they do not explain, why fragments are sometimes (dis)preferred provided that their usage is licensed. This book proposes an information-theoretic account of fragments, which predicts that the usage of fragments in constrained by a general tendency to distribute processing effort uniformly across the utterance. With respect to fragments, this leads to two predictions, which are empirically confirmed: Speakers tend towards omitting predictable words and they insert additional redundancy before unpredictable words.

This book investigates the syntax and usage of fragments (Morgan 1973), apparently subsentential utterances like "A coffee, please!" which fulfill the same communicative function as the corresponding full sentence "I'd like to have a coffee, please!". Even though such utterances are frequently used, they challenge the central role that has been attributed to the notion of sentence in linguistic theory, particularly from a semantic perspective. The first part of the book is dedicated to the syntactic analysis of fragments, which is investigated with experimental methods. Currently there are several competing theoretical analyses of fragments, which rely almost only on introspective data. The experiments presented in this book constitute a first systematic evaluation of some of their crucial predictions and, taken together, support an in situ ellipsis account of fragments, as has been suggested by Reich (2007). The second part of the book addresses the questions of why fragments are used at all, and under which circumstances they are preferred over complete sentences. Syntactic accounts impose licensing conditions on fragments, but they do not explain, why fragments are sometimes (dis)preferred provided that their usage is licensed. This book proposes an information-theoretic account of fragments, which predicts that the usage of fragments in constrained by a general tendency to distribute processing effort uniformly across the utterance. With respect to fragments, this leads to two predictions, which are empirically confirmed: Speakers tend towards omitting predictable words and they insert additional redundancy before unpredictable words.

Linguistics has suffered from the lack of interaction between theoretical and experimental activities. In order to carry out experimental studies in language it is, of course, necessary to have a descriptive system for the stimuli, and formal linguistics has provided a plethora of alternative possibilities. In addition, the theory can perhaps suggest some hints as to the direction experimental studies might take, at least to the extent that it suggest various kinds of relation among syntactic or phonological structures. But the theory alone cannot determine the nature of such relations in the cognitive or processing system of the language user. The first section of this volume addresses several of the key theoretical controversies in linguistics and attempts to specify the kinds of experimental evidence which might contribute to their ultimate resolution. The papers in the second section concern the collection of that evidence and its interpretation.

This volume showcases the contributions that formal experimental methods can make to syntactic research in the 21st century. Syntactic theory is both a domain of study in its own right, and one component of an integrated theory of the cognitive neuroscience of language. It provides a theory of the mediation between sound and meaning, a theory of the representations constructed during sentence processing, and a theory of the end-state for language acquisition. Given the highly interactive nature of the theory of syntax, this volume defines "experimental syntax" in the broadest possible terms, exploring both formal experimental methods that have been part of the domain of syntax since its inception (i.e., acceptability judgment methods) and formal experimental methods that have arisen through the interaction of syntactic theory with the domains of acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Experimental Syntax brings these methods together into a single experimental syntax volume for the first time, providing high-level reviews of major experimental work, offering guidance for researchers looking to incorporate these diverse methods into their own work, and inspiring new research that will push the boundaries of the theory of syntax. It will appeal to students and scholars from the advanced undergraduate level upwards in a range of fields including syntax, acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics.

The first of its kind, this Handbook provides an in-depth overview of all current issues and trends in experimental syntax.

This book presents a comprehensive picture of reflexive pronouns from both a theoretical and experimental perspective, using the well-researched languages of English, German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In order to understand the data from varying theoretical perspectives, the book considers selected syntactic and pragmatic analyses based on their current importance in the field. The volume consequently introduces the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach, which is a novel theoretical synthesis incorporating a sentence and pragmatic processor that accounts for reflexive pronoun behaviour in these six languages. Moreover, in support of this model a vast array of experimental literature is considered, including first and second language acquisition, bilingual, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies. It is through both the intuitive and experimental data linguistic theorizing relies upon that brings out the strengths of the modelling adopted here, paving new avenues for future research. In sum, this volume unites a diverse array of the literature that currently sits largely divorced between the theoretical and experimental realms, and when put together a better understanding of reflexive pronouns under the auspices of the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach is forged.