Carson Schütze

This squib challenges Patterson & Caponigro's (2015, this journal) claim that there are few acceptable free relative clauses with who. We show that free relatives with who are generally acceptable when they are ‘transparent’ free relatives or complements of a copula, and add further nuance to their findings concerning how the degree of acceptability of free relatives with who varies according to positional factors.

With the introduction of AGREE into Minimalism by Chomsky (2000), the relationship between the two elements in an agreement relationship went from being strictly local (Specifier-Head) to being unbounded (c-command with no intervening strong phase boundary) in order to accommodate long-distance agreement phenomena. Concern over the less restricted nature of the new approach led researchers to propose alternatives that eschewed the unbounded reach of AGREE , in the hope that a more restrictive theory might yet be salvaged. This paper scrutinizes some of the most widely cited and fully developed of these alternative proposals (employing predicate inversion of expletives, restructuring, covert movement), applied to extensively studied spheres of data (English existentials, Icelandic agreement), and concludes that they are deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. While Chomsky’s version of AGREE is far from providing a complete and satisfactory theory of agreement, it has yet to be shown that it can be eliminated.

This chapter addresses how linguists’ empirical (syntactic) claims should be tested with non-linguists. Recent experimental work attempts to measure rates of convergence between data presented in journal articles and the results of large surveys. Three follow-up experiments to one such study are presented. It is argued that the original method may underestimate the true rate of convergence because it leaves considerable room for naïve subjects to give ratings that do not reflect their true acceptability judgments of the relevant structures. To understand what can go wrong, the experiments were conducted in two parts. The first part had visually presented sentences rated on a computer, replicating previous work. The second part was an interview where the experimenter asked the participants about the ratings they gave to particular items, in order to determine what interpretation or parse they had assigned, whether they had missed any critical words, and so on.

This chapter is intended to serve as a jumping-off point for thinking about the use of data in grammatical theories, for both linguists and non-linguists. Five types of linguistic data are discussed—corpus data, acceptability judgements, reading time measures (eye-tracking and self-paced reading), electrophysiological data (EEG and MEG), and haemodynamic data (specifically, fMRI)—with a particular focus on the logic necessary to link each data type to predictions made by grammatical theories (linking hypotheses). The chapter also covers the empirical and logical challenges facing each data type, in an attempt to encourage closer ties among researchers using each of the data types.

This paper provides novel data, including from acceptability ratings, supporting a unified analysis of Transparent Free Relatives (TFRs) as variants of Standard Free Relatives (SFRs), rather than entirely different beasts. Two arguments are presented. First, who-TFRs exist, contrary to the view in the literature that TFRs can only be formed with what. Second, who-TFRs degrade following the same illunderstood pattern as who-SFRs. These outcomes cohere better with accounts of TFRs that treat them as similar to SFRs, versus accounts that treat them as virtually unrelated.

In British English, sentences like This film has monsters in are possible without the pronoun it. Descriptively, we refine landscape of the phenomenon, identifying restrictions on the distribution and interpretation of OLPs, including dialectal variation within British English, and observing an A-bar movement restriction on monsters. Analytically, we argue against an A-movement analysis (Griffiths & Sailor), and ponder alternatives from a cross-linguistic perspective.

This paper concerns itself with dialectal differences between British Eng-lish (BrE) and American English (AmE) regarding modal have-got and its scope with respect to sentential negation. Modal haven’t got is perfectly acceptable in BrE, meaning ‘not obligated to’ in the standard variety. In AmE, modal have-got is somewhat degraded when the have has unambiguously raised, and especially so when it is negated, as shown in a preliminary acceptability judgement survey of American English speakers. An analysis in terms of polarity sensitivity is inadequate, and Iatridou & Zeijlstra’s (2013) syntax for modals is overly restrictive in the face of scopally ambiguous have not (got) to in non-standard varieties of BrE. We propose an analysis in terms of the locus of modality: whereas have and got are separate in BrE, in AmE have-got is a scopally indivisible whole. Finally, we evaluate how well this analysis extends to an additional dialectal difference in verb phrase ellipsis (LeSourd 1976), where the have of have-got survives ellipsis in BrE but not AmE.

Preliminaries This chapter covers what have traditionally been called grammaticality judgments in linguistics (which are more aptly referred to as acceptability judgments – see below). We examine such judgments from several angles, with the goal of assisting researchers in deciding whether and how to use this kind of data. Our goal in this chapter is to provide an introduction to the major themes that arise when using acceptability judgments as a data source for the construction of linguistic theories. Importantly, this chapter will not be a step-by-step guide for constructing a particular experiment, as the curious reader can find several fine introductions to the mechanics of experiment construction and analysis elsewhere (e.g., Chapters 7 and 8, and Cowart 1997). Instead, we intend this chapter to be an introduction to the theory underlying the methodology of acceptability judgment collection. Most of what follows will involve discussion of syntactic well-formedness judgments, because that is where the greatest amount of research about judgment data has been focused, but we believe that many of our remarks are also relevant for judgments at other levels of linguistic representation. Specific considerations regarding other sorts of judgments can be found elsewhere in this volume. For example, judgments about the lexicon and phonotactic well-formedness are generally gathered in the language documentation process (see Chapter 4); judgments about morphological processes might be gathered using the experimental methods that predominate in psycholinguistics (see Chapter 8); judgments about sociolinguistic variables might be gathered via a survey (see Chapter 6). For considerations specific to semantic judgments, see Matthewson (2004) and Chemla and Spector (2011).

Subjacency characterizes a set of phenomena whose acquisition must be explained by any proposal for human language learning. We take a broader perspective than previous responses to Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (2014), arguing that they have not shown that this UG principle is ‘redundant’ because their proposed alternative does not take into account firmly established constraints on A-bar dependencies. We illustrate a range of challenges for theories hoping to reduce subjacency to independently motivated, primarily nonsyntactic constraints: they must include a way to account for attested crosslinguistic variation in island effects, the cross-construction generality of island effects, and the effects of resumption and of WH-in-situ on island behavior.