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

这个奖项是根据2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）的全部或部分资助的。一般来说，可以通过从看似任意数量的从句中“移动”一个wh短语，如“谁”或“哪个男孩”来形成一个问题，如“艾莉说艾米看到了谁？”“，“艾丽西娅听到艾丽说艾米看到了谁？在这些疑问句中，“who”是“saw”的逻辑宾语，但却出现在句首。然而，有一些句法环境，通常被称为“岛屿”，在其中不可能形成疑问句。一个像“谁让这本书让每个人都高兴？”--其本意是“谁是那个人，以至于那个人的书让每个人都很高兴”--听起来不自然，这表明尽管有合理的含义，但这不是一个可能的问题。一些语言学家声称，当不恰当的结构被省略时，这些限制就消失了，比如在一个句子中，“艾米说，某人写的书让每个人都很高兴，但我不记得是谁了”。这样的句子对说英语的人来说听起来更自然一些，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符合语法，从而推进语言学理论。在推进这一领域的同时，本项目还将通过培养一名本科生研究助理来支持教育和多样性。本博士论文项目使用行为方法，探讨说话者的报告判断与他们对有省略和无省略问题的结构敏感性之间的联系。我们的目标是确定是否相同的原则适用于依赖关系，涉及省略的那些不，与确定的计算原则，句法局部性的长期目标。更一般地说，该项目解决了报告的可接受性和潜意识的敏感性之间的不匹配结构的可接受性judgment.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.