Interdisciplinary Colloquium
Mandy Cartner, Tel Aviv University
As part of the department’s weekly research colloquium,
held every Thursday from 16:15 to 17:45 in the Webb Building (Room 103),
the following lecture by Mandy Cartner (Tel Aviv University) will take place:
Online dependency resolution given competing structural pressures: The case of fronted reflexives
Abstract:
Dependency resolution is a predictive process. In filler-gap dependencies, a filler triggers an active search for its gap, reflected in the filled-gap effect (FGE): increased difficulty when a potential gap position is filled (e.g., Stowe, 1986). Likewise, in cataphoric dependencies, a cataphor triggers an active search for an antecedent, reflected in difficulty when a potential antecedent mismatches the cataphor’s features (e.g., Giskes & Kush, 2021). We investigate readers’ online predictions when these two searches are triggered simultaneously, in sentences headed by a “reflexive-filler”, e.g., “Which picture of herself”. Grammatically, the two searches triggered by the reflexive-filler are not independent: the antecedent must be hierarchically higher than the gap, and bind the reflexive in its base position. In 3 online reading studies, we investigate whether this grammatical constraint informs online predictions, focusing on filled-gap (FG) sentences, e.g. (1).
(1) Which picture of herself did the {queen | king} see the girl admiring _?
When the matrix subject matches the reflexive’s features (‘queen’), a gap would be grammatical in the FG position (object of ‘see’); when they mismatch (‘king’), it would not. Does this grammatical constraint affect gap prediction, modulating the FGE on ‘the girl’? We report evidence that the FGE on ‘the girl’ is smaller following a mismatching subject (‘king’), suggesting that gap prediction is sensitive to the requirements of the reflexive-filler. However, the FGE persisted even without an antecedent, which is unpredicted if the parser were grammatically driven: grammatically, no gap should be posited unless an antecedent was identified. Interestingly, this is unlike Island structures, which are evidenced to fully block gap prediction (Stowe, 1986; Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher 2017; Levy, 2008).
All are welcome!
