{"pk":28540,"title":"Verb Frequency Explains the Unacceptability of Factive and Manner-of-speaking\nIslands in English","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The unacceptability of wh-extraction (e.g., question\nformation) out of certain syntactic structures, known as\n‘island’ effects, has been a central topic in theoretical syntax\nfor many years (Ross, 1967; Chomsky, 1973). A prominent\nexample of islands is that extraction out of a sentential\ncomplement introduced by factive and manner-of-speaking\nverbs (‘What did John know/whisper that Mary bought?’) is\nless acceptable than extraction from a clause introduced by\n“bridge” verbs (‘What did John say that Mary bought?’). We\naimed to replicate Ambridge and Goldberg (2008) who\nargued that extraction from a sentential complement is\nunacceptable in proportion to its discourse salience. We failed\nto replicate their results and found that there is no true island\neffect for such structures: instead there are separate, additive\npenalties based on two factors: (a) verb-frame frequency (cf.\nDabrowska, 2008), and (b) the presence of extraction. These\npenalties give rise to apparent island effects as a result of the\nnonlinear relationship between true acceptability and\nacceptability ratings as measured in Likert scales and forced-\nchoice tasks.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Sentence Processing; Frequency Effect;\nAcceptability of Sentences; Long-distance Dependencie"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zb7m1zr","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yingtong","middle_name":"","last_name":"Liu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Rachel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ryskin","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Richard","middle_name":"","last_name":"Futrell","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Irvine","department":""},{"first_name":"Edward","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gibson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Boston University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T21:00:00+03:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28540/galley/18411/download/"}]}