• Slides from Class (.pdf file )

Main Points about Processing Factors:

1. cumulative effects
2. distance effects
3. intervention effects (including a summary of Rizzi's (1990) notion of intervention)
4. lexical frequency/semantics
5. finiteness
6. collocation/affinity

• Ross, J.R. (1987). Remarkably visionary. He casts the proposal in terms of viability: "The idea here is that it is possible for a sentence to deviate from a prototype, and yet not manifest any drop in acceptability. Losses in viability are cumulative, and only when there have been enough of them for a certain threshold value to be exceeded will the speakers of the language perceive that the sentence is less than perfect." (p. 310) The "fairly obvious prototypes" he discussed include: affirmative vs. negative, declaratives vs. questions, null vs. overt complementizers, assertive vs. factive, specific vs. non-specific indefinite NPs (as regards extractability), 1 clause vs. 2 clauses, finite vs. nonfinite (though this appears to be in the opposite direction from what you would expect).
• Kluender, R. (1992). `Predication principles'. The notion that all heads and specifiers in the scope of an unbounded dependency make a difference. This is in contrast to the Alexopoulou and Keller proposal (see below), which claims that all syntactic heads matter (offered as a modification of the Gibson proposal, where it is only intervening discourse referents that matter; see p. 41 of the pre-print manuscript).
• Hawkins, J. (1999): Distance effects. `minimize FGDs' (10), p. 251 clause embedding hierarchy (30), p. 263 Finiteness effects (pp. 269-270) Intervention effects (pp. 270-273).
• Alexopoulou, D. and Keller, F. (2007): Clear evidence for effects of embedding, even in declaratives Syntactic/functional heads intervening between filler and gap make a difference.

Readings:

• Ross, J.R. 1987. Islands and syntactic prototypes. In B. Need, E. Schiller, and A. Bosch (eds.), Papers from the General Session at the Twenty-Third Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. CLS 23, part 1, Pp. 309-320. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. (.pdf)
• Kluender, R. 1992. Deriving island contraints from principles of predication. In H. Goodluck and M. Rochemont (eds.), Island Constraints: Theory, Processing, and Acquisition, 223-258E Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (.pdf)
• Alexopoulou, D. and Keller, F. 2007. Locality, cyclicity and resumption: At the interface between grammar and the human sentence processor. Language 83 (1): 110-160. (.pdf)

Further Reading:

• Hawkins, J. 1999. Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies Across grammars. Language 75 (2): 244-285. (.pdf)

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Last Updated: June 28, 2007