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

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。一般来说，通过从看似任意数量的从句中“移动”像“谁”或“哪个男孩”这样的“谁”短语来形成疑问句是可能的，如“艾莉说艾米看到了谁？”，“艾丽西亚听到谁说艾莉说艾米看到了谁？”等等。在这些问题中，“谁”是“看见”的逻辑对象，却出现在句子的开头。然而，在某些句法环境中，通常被称为“孤岛”，在这些环境中，问题的形成是不可能的。像“谁的书让所有人都喜欢？”——它的本意是“谁是这样一个人，以至于他的书让每个人都喜欢？”——对说英语的人来说，这听起来不自然，这表明尽管这个问题有合理的含义，但它不可能是一个问题。一些语言学家声称，当这些令人不快的结构被省略时，这些限制就会消失，比如在“艾米说某人的书让每个人都很喜欢，但我不记得是谁了”这样的句子中。对于说英语的人来说，这样的句子听起来更自然，但它们的地位并不完全清楚。本论文项目将通过使用最新的实验技术来确定这些句子是否合乎语法，从而推进语言学理论。在推进这一领域的同时，该项目还将通过培养一名本科生研究助理在这些实验技术、科学思维和统计分析方面的能力来支持教育和多样性。本博士论文项目采用行为学方法，探讨说话人在有省略号和没有省略号的问题中所报告的判断与他们对结构的敏感性之间的联系。我们的目标是确定相同的原则是否适用于涉及省略号的依赖关系，其长期目标是确定控制语法局部性的计算原则。更一般地说，该项目解决了在可接受性判断中报告的可接受性和对结构的潜意识敏感性之间不匹配的后果。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.