Fall 2022 lab meetings

We will meet this quarter on Fridays at 1:00.

October 7
We'll discuss this recent article:

Tian Q, Park M-K and Yang X (2022) Mandarin Chinese wh-in-situ argument–adjunct asymmetry in island sensitivity: Evidence from a formal judgment study. Front. Psychol. 13:954175.   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.954175

This is a reaction (and rebuttal) to an article that we read last Fall:

Lu, J., Thompson, C. K., & Yoshida, M. (2020). Chinese wh-in-situ and islands: A formal judgment study. Linguistic Inquiry, 51(3), 611-623. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760257/pdf

October 14
We'll talk about this recent article, on the island sensitivity of NP-scrambling in Japanese:

Fukuda, S. & Tanaka, N. & Ono, H. & Sprouse, J., (2022) “An experimental reassessment of complex NP islands with NP-scrambling in Japanese”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5737

October 21

This week we'll discuss Gisbert Fanselow's chapter on grammar and processing in The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax.

October 28

We'll get started this week on our discussion of the Villata & Tabor article that just appeared in Cognition:

Villata, S., & Tabor, W. (2022). A self-organized sentence processing theory of gradience: The case of islands. Cognition, 222, 104943.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027721003668?via%3Dihub

November 4

Continued discussion of the Villata & Tabor article!

November 18

Alex will give us an overview of his recent experiment on CLLD in Spanish.

December 2

For our final lab meeting of the quarter, Duk-Ho will walk us through some preliminary results from his new experiment on extraction of arguments vs. adjuncts. These are usually claimed to be different in certain crucial ways (e.g., all islands block adjunct extraction, but only some islands block argument extraction), but the data are subtle and maybe even suspect, so Duk-Ho has been exploring this topic by means of a formal experiment. 

Duk-Ho's work published in Journal of Linguistics!

Duk-Ho and Grant have a new article in Journal of Linguistics showing that backward sprouting (as in "Though I don't know what, Mary drank on the bus"), is NOT sensitive to islands, contrary to what is often claimed, and is thus different from the wh-dependencies that it superficially resembles. It IS sensitive to the distance of the dependency, however. 

Jung, D., & Goodall, G. (2022). Filler–gap dependencies and the remnant–correlate dependency in backward sprouting: Sensitivity to distance and islands. Journal of Linguistics, 1-21. doi:10.1017/S0022226722000366

 

New article on the that-trace effect!

 Dept. alum Boyoung Kim and Grant Goodall have a new article in Second Language Research (open access!) where they argue that the results of their experiments on L2 English provide crucial new evidence on what causes the "that-trace effect" (the fact that subjects cannot be extracted from embedded that-clauses, as in *Who do you think that __ has arrived?). 

Grant's new book

 Grant's latest book, Theory and Experiment in Syntax, has just been published as part of the Routledge Leading Linguists series! The book is primarily a collection of previously published articles, but there are two new pieces: an introduction ("Five themes in the study of syntax") and a new chapter on cross-linguistic variation is island behavior ("D-linking, non-finiteness, and cross-linguistic variation in island phenomena"). 

Maho goes to Chicago!

 Maho presented some of her recent work on relative clauses in Japanese at this year's Chicago Linguistic Society conference. Her poster was entitled "Do islands care about the direction of the dependency? Evidence from double-gap relatives in Japanese".

CHES is here!

 The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax is now available, both online and in hardcopy. It has 27 chapters covering all aspects of experimental approaches to syntax, including chapters by lots of current and former UCSD people: Grant Goodall (who also edited the volume), Robert Kluender, Shin Fukuda, Shota Momma, and William Matchin. All of the content is freely available online for UCSD affiliates (use VPN if you are not on campus).

Spring 2022 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be Fridays 10:30-12:00.

April 8

Maho will give us her preview of her upcoming poster at the Chicago Linguistic Society.

April 15

Tory will walk us through her recent experiment comparing one putative copula in ASL with two others.

April 22 + May 6

We will discuss: Liu, Y. Winckel, E., Abeillé, E., Hemforth, B. & Gibson, E. (2022). Structural, Functional, and Processing Perspectives on Linguistic Island Effects. Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8.  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030319

May 13

Discussion of: Morgan, A. (2022). The that-trace effect and island boundary-gap effect are the same: Demonstrating equivalence with null hypothesis significance testing and psychometrics. Glossa Psycholinguistics. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1gp237sm 

May 20

We'll discuss two papers in experimental syntax from the recently concluded WCCFL conference:

Huang et al.: "How good are leading theories of bridge verbs? An experimental evaluation"

Shen & Lim: "The definite DP island in wh questions and relative clauses"

May 27

We'll discuss: Vincent, J. W., Sichel, I., & Wagers , M. W. (2022). Extraction from English RCs and Cross-Linguistic Similarities in the Environments That Facilitate Extraction. Languages, 7(2), 117. MDPI AG.  http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages7020117

 

June 4

It's the end of the quarter and time for some more progress reports!

Alex: Wh-questions and Clitic Left-Dislocation with strong and weak islands

Duk-Ho: Adjunct extraction with strong and weak islands (and related topics)

Maho: Extraction out of relative clauses in Japanese: some new discoveries

Winter 2022 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be held Fridays 3:00-4:30.

January 14

Maho will give us an update on her upcoming experiment on double-gap relative clauses in Japanese.

January 21

Duk-Ho will give us a progress report on the experiment that he is developing to explore argument vs. adjunct extraction.

January 28

Alex will walk us through his about-to-be-run experiment on wh-extraction and Clitic Left-Dislocation in Spanish.

February 4

Discussion of: Yang, C., & Montrul, S. (2017). Learning datives: The Tolerance Principle in monolingual and bilingual acquisition. Second Language Research, 33(1), 119-144.

February 11

Discussion of: Newmeyer, F. J. (2016). Nonsyntactic explanations of island constraints. Annual Review of Linguistics, 2, 187-210.  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011415-040707

February 18 + 25

Discussion of: van Urk, C. (2020). Successive Cyclicity and the Syntax of Long-Distance Dependencies. Annual Review of Linguistics Vol. 6:111-130 

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-012318

March 4

Discussion of: Cokal D, Sturt P (2022) The real-time status of strong and weak islands. PLoS ONE 17(2): e0263879. 

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263879

March 11

Progress reports from Alex, Duk-Ho, and Maho on the experiments that they are currently preparing and/or running.

Fall 2021 lab meetings

Our meetings this quarter will be held Fridays 12 - 1. 

October 8 + 15

Discussion of: Liu, Y. et al. (2021). A verb-frame frequency account of constraints on long-distance dependencies in English.  Cognition, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104902

October 22 + 29

Discussion of: Hirayama, H., (2018) “Revisiting a null pronominal account for parasitic gaps in Japanese”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1), p.117. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.522

November 5

Discussion of: Lu, J., Thompson, C. K., & Yoshida, M. (2020). Chinese wh-in-situ and islands: A formal judgment study. Linguistic Inquiry, 51(3), 611-623.

November 12 + 19

Discussion of: Abeillé, A., Hemforth, B., Winckel, E., & Gibson, E. (2020). Extraction from subjects: Differences in acceptability depend on the discourse function of the construction. Cognition, 204, 104293.

November 28

Continuation of previous article and discussion of: Kush, D. & Sant, C. & Strætkvern, S. B., (2021) “Learning Island-insensitivity from the input: A corpus analysis of child- and youth-directed text in Norwegian”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5774