Doctoral Dissertation Research: Experimental Investigations of Multiple Wh-Questions

在Martin Hackl博士的指导下，Hadas Kotek女士将对英语中多个wh-问题的实时处理进行心理语言学实验（例如，“约翰问哪些学生昨晚看不懂哪个标志。多个wh疑问句是关于内隐运动（CM）操作是否存在的争论中的一个中心结构。争论围绕着CM操作是否负责解释逻辑形式（LF）的句法层面上的语义操作，或者是否必须采用替代机制的问题。CM假设认为，在类似上面例子的语境中，“which students”和“which sign”都被视为语义操作符，它们通过隐蔽地移出该结构而占据了[x could not read y last night]的范围，尽管“which sign”仍然是句子（显性）语音形式中较大单位的组成部分。 这个研究项目的结果将有助于这场辩论的实验测试CM操作在多个wh-问题的存在。该项目旨在提供一个详细的和理论上知情的描述和分析的逻辑形式的wh-问题。将收集关键的新证据，以区分两种主要方法。虽然这些方法在处理疑问句的句法和语义上有很大的不同，但传统的研究方法并没有成功地在这些方法之间进行选择。 这种缺乏成功的原因之一是，离线的判断，从母语的线人收集的可接受性，幸福，多个问题的语义内容不提供直接的证据CM，并没有查明CM的语法原因的wh-表达式。该项目提出了一个实验研究的多个wh-问题，超越了离线判断。特别是，它建议进行三个实时句子处理实验，以测试这两种方法所做的不同预测。 这些实验将研究的语法配置集中在所谓的干预效应，这一直是当前关于多个wh-问句的句法和语义的争论的核心。该项目将为干预效应的存在和性质提供新的实验证据，这些证据以前没有经过经验检验。该奖项还将支持一个有前途的学者的科学培训。

Under the direction of Dr. Martin Hackl, Ms. Hadas Kotek will conduct psycholinguistic experiments on the real-time processing of multiple wh-questions in English (e.g., "John asked which students could not read which sign last night"). Multiple wh-questions are a central construction in the debate regarding the existence of Covert Movement (CM) operations. The debate revolves around the question of whether CM operations are responsible for the interpretation of semantic operators at the syntactic level of Logical Form (LF), or whether alternative mechanisms must be adopted. The CM hypothesis holds that, in contexts like the example above, both "which students" and "which sign" are treated as semantic operators that take scope over [x could not read y last night] by covertly moving out of that structure despite the fact that "which sign" remains a constituent of that larger unit in the (overt) phonological form of the sentence. The results of this research project will contribute to this debate by experimentally testing the existence of CM operations in multiple wh-questions. The project seeks to provide a detailed and theoretically informed description and analysis of the Logical Form of wh-questions. Crucial new evidence will be collected that will distinguish between two main approaches. Although these approaches differ substantially in their treatment of the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, traditional means of investigation have not been successful in choosing between these approaches. One reason for this lack of success is that off-line judgments collected from native speaker informants regarding the acceptability, felicity, and semantic content of multiple questions do not provide direct evidence about CM, and have not pinpointed the grammatical causes of CM for wh-expressions. The project proposes an experimental investigation of multiple wh-questions which goes beyond off-line judgments. In particular, it proposes to conduct three real-time sentence processing experiments to test differing predictions made by these two approaches. The grammatical configurations that these experiments will investigate focus on so-called intervention effects, which have been central to current debates about the syntax and semantics of multiple wh-questions. This project will provide novel experimental evidence for the existence and nature of intervention effects, which have not been previously tested empirically. This award will also support the scientific training of a promising scholar.