Conjunction Agreement and the Coordinate Structure Constraint

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Abstract

A long-standing question in syntax is what role linear order plays in a hierarchical grammar. Phenomena that on the surface show sensitivity to linear order have been particularly illuminating. When agreeing with coordinated subjects with different gender features, participles in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), Slovenian, and other languages allow multiple options including agreeing with the linearly closest conjunct. This pattern motivated an analysis where linear order can play a role in a syntactic operation such as agreement (Marušič et al. 2015; Willer-Gold et al. 2016 among others). On the other hand, Murphy & Puškar (2018) show that the pattern can be accounted for without resorting to linear order. This paper provides novel evidence from Coordinate Structure Constraint violating movement in BCS to argue for the non-linear approach. If the argument is on the right track, agreement can be kept within syntax without resorting to PF conditions.

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Cognitive Constraints and Island Effects.

Philip Hofmeister, Ivan A Sag (2010)

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that non-structural manipulations that leave island structures intact can radically alter judgments of island violations. We argue here, building on work by Deane, Kluender, and others, that processing factors have the potential to account for this otherwise unexplained variation in acceptability judgments.We report the results of self-paced reading experiments and controlled acceptability studies which explore the relationship between processing costs and judgments of acceptability. In each of the three self-paced reading studies, the data indicate that the processing cost of different types of island violations can be significantly reduced to a degree comparable to that of non-island filler-gap constructions by manipulating a single non-structural factor. Moreover, this reduction in processing cost is accompanied by significant improvements in acceptability. This evidence favors the hypothesis that island-violating constructions involve numerous processing pressures that aggregate to drive processing difficulty above a threshold so that a perception of unacceptability ensues. We examine the implications of these findings for the grammar of filler-gap dependencies.