Doctoral Dissertation Research: Subjacency, the Empty Category Principle (ECP), and the nature of constraints on phrase movement

这一奖项的全部或部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(Public Law 117-2)。一般来说，可以通过从看似武断的几个从句中移出一个wh短语来形成问题，比如“谁”或“哪个男孩”，比如“Allie说艾米看到了谁？”，“Alicia听到了谁，Allie说艾米看到了谁？”等等。在这些疑问句中，“谁”是“看见”的逻辑宾语，但出现在句子的开头。然而，在某些句法环境中，通常被称为“孤岛”，在这种环境中，疑问句的形成是不可能的。像“谁写的这本书让所有人都高兴？”这样的问题--它的本意是‘那个人是谁，以至于那个人的书让每个人都高兴’--对于说英语的人来说听起来不自然，这意味着尽管这个问题的意思很合理，但它不是一个可能的问题。一些语言学家声称，当这个令人不快的结构被省略时，这些限制就会消失，比如在一句话中，比如“艾米说有人写的书让每个人都很高兴，但我不记得是谁了”。对于说英语的人来说，这样的句子听起来更自然一些，但它们的地位并不完全清楚。本论文将通过使用最新的实验技术来确定这些句子是否符合语法，从而推动语言学理论的发展。在推动这一领域的发展中，该项目还将通过培训一名本科生研究助理了解这些实验技术、科学思维和统计分析，以支持教育和多样性。本博士论文项目使用行为方法，探索说话者的报告判断与他们在有或没有省略的问题中对结构的敏感性之间的联系。我们的目标是确定涉及省略的依赖关系是否适用于与不涉及省略的依赖关系，较长期的目标是确定管理句法位置的计算原则。更广泛地说，该项目解决了报告的可接受性和在可接受性判断中对结构的潜意识敏感性之间不匹配的后果。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).In general, it is possible to form a question by 'moving' a wh-phrase like "who” or "which boy" out of a seemingly arbitrary number of clauses, as in "Who did Allie say that Amy saw?", "Who did Alicia hear that Allie said that Amy saw?", and so on. In these questions, "who" is the logical object of "saw" yet appears at the beginning of the sentence. However, there are certain syntactic environments, commonly called 'islands,' in which question formation is not possible. A question like "Who did the book by delight everyone?"--whose intended meaning is 'who is the person such that the book by that person delighted everyone'--sounds unnatural to speakers of English, suggesting that it is not a possible question despite having a reasonable meaning. Some linguists have claimed that these constraints disappear when the offending structure is elided, such as in a sentence like "Amy said that the book by someone delighted everyone, but I don't remember who". Such sentences sound a bit more natural to speakers of English, but their status isn't entirely clear. This dissertation project will advance linguistic theory by using recent experimental techniques to ascertain whether such sentences are grammatical. In advancing the field, this project will also support education and diversity by training an undergraduate research assistant in these experimental techniques, scientific thinking, and statistical analysis.Using behavioral methods, this doctoral dissertation project probes the link between speakers' reported judgments and their sensitivity to structure in questions with and without ellipsis. The goal is to determine whether the same principles apply to dependencies involving ellipsis as those that do not, with the longer term goal of identifying the computational principles governing syntactic locality. More generally, the project addresses the consequences of mismatches between reported acceptability and subliminal sensitivity to structure in acceptability judgments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.