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

博士论文研究：下属、空范畴原则（ECP）以及短语移动约束的本质

• 批准号: 2116270
• 负责人: Jeffrey Lidz
• 金额: $ 1.85万
• 依托单位: University of Maryland, College Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-08-01 至 2024-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2116270&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Subjacency; Empty

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.

该奖项是根据2021年《美国救援计划法》的全部或部分资助（公法117-2）。总的来说，可以通过“移动”像“谁”或“谁”或“哪个男孩”之类的问题来形成一个问题，就像在“看似任意的”线索中，就像在“艾莉说的艾米那样”，就像谁看见了艾莉，那是谁看见了？在这些问题中，“谁”是“锯”的逻辑对象，但出现在句子的开头。但是，某些句法环境通常称为“岛屿”，其中不可能形成问题。一个问题“谁是为了让每个人都喜欢的书？一些语言学家声称，当出现有问题的结构时，这些限制会消失，例如在诸如“艾米说某人的书”之类的句子中，我不记得谁”。这样的句子对于英语的说话者来说听起来更自然，但其状态并不完全清楚。该论文项目将通过使用最新的实验技术来确定这种句子是否是语法，可以推进语言理论。在推进该领域的过程中，该项目还将通过培训这些实验技术，科学思维和统计分析的本科研究助理来支持教育和多样性。使用行为方法，该博士学位论文项目项目投射了说话者报道的法官与他们在问题中和没有椭圆方面的问题中对结构的敏感性之间的联系。目标是确定是否适用于涉及的依赖项，其长期目标是识别句法位置的计算原理。更一般而言，该项目解决了报告可接受性和对潜意识法官结构的敏感性之间不匹配的后果。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响审查标准的评估来通过评估来获得的支持。