Published in Linguistics Vanguard
This article presents a review of current research in experimental syntax, with a focus on three open questions and the (methodo)logical tools that have been developed to explore them. The three questions are: (1) Are the published data underlying syntactic theories valid?, (2) How can we determine the source of acceptability judgment differences?,...
Rhetorical questions (RQs), generally considered as questions with an illocutionary force of a strong assertion of opposite polarity, do not show the same pattern in different languages. They behave differently in languages like Japanese, where clause types can be marked by sentence-final particles, and languages like English, where there is no mor...
Published in Frontiers in Psychology
Syntactic satiation is the phenomenon where some sentences that initially seem ungrammatical appear more acceptable after repeated exposures (Snyder, 2000). We investigated satiation by manipulating two factors known to affect syntactic priming, a phenomenon where recent exposure to a grammatical structure facilitates subsequent processing of that ...
Published in The Linguistic Review
This paper explores Merge and proposes a new form of sideward movement (double sideward movement) carried out by a new application of External Merge. Double sideward movement occurs in the following way: given a syntactic object S containing XP and YP, Merge applies to XP and YP, and creates {XP, YP} outside S, thus causing XP and YP to undergo sid...
Published in Studies in Chinese Linguistics
This article proposes a pro analysis for split questions (SQs) in Chinese, dissimilar to the biclausal account employing focus movement and deletion in Arregi 2010 and the one employing the silent head in Kayne 2015 and Tang 2015. SQ consists of a wh-clause and a tag clause. We argue that the entire SQ is an information/confirmation-seeking questio...
Published in Frontiers in Psychology
It has been assumed that the wh-element weishenme “why” in Chinese has two distinct interpretations: a reason reading, which typically yields yinwei “because”-answers, and a purpose reading, which typically triggers weile “in order to”-answers. It is claimed that the two interpretations differ in island sensitivity: the reason weishenme is sensitiv...
In the first two decades following Ross’s Constraints on Variables in Syntax, a picture emerged in which the Mainland Scandinavian (MS) languages appeared to systematically evade some of the locality constraints proposed by Ross, including the relative clause (RC) part of the complex NP constraint. The MS extraction patterns remain a topic of debat...
Published in The Linguistic Review
Chinese, a topic-prominent language, abounds with gapped and gapless topic constructions. Several explanations of how topics are derived have been proposed, which fall into three categories: the base-generation approach, the mixed approach and the movement approach. In this study, we conducted two experiments to examine the island sensitivity of to...
The investigation of taxonomic diversity within island plant communities stands as a central focus in the field of island biogeography. Phylogenetic diversity is crucial for unraveling the evolutionary history, ecological functions, and species combinations within island plant communities. Island effects (area and isolation effect) may shape specie...
While strong islands generally constitute domains from which extraction is not possible, it has been observed that under certain conditions, they may allow DP but not PP gaps. Based on the recent literature on Asante Twi (Kwa, Ghana) and on novel data from Limbum (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon), this paper shows that strong island configurations in t...
