Conférence Culicover 3 mars

[Denis Paillard]

*CONFERENCES DU LABORATOIRE DE LINGUISTIQUE FORMELLE*

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(UMR 7110 / Université Paris Diderot)

*Lundi 3 mars 2008 16 h 30 – 18 h 30*

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30 rue du château des rentiers, 1^er étage salle 124

/Beyond Simpler Syntax: Processing complexity and //explaining island 
phenomena/

Conference de Peter W. Culicover (The Ohio State University)

I focus on three closely related questions:

    * Why do natural languages have extraction islands?
    * Why do extraction islands take the form that we observe?
    * Why is there variability in the acceptability of extraction island
      violations?

I argue that we can begin to answer these questions by adopting the 
Simpler Syntax perspective of Culicover and Jackendoff (2005, 2006). On 
this view, syntactic representations are as simple as possible, as long 
as the correspondence between form and meaning is accounted for. I show 
that the Simpler Syntax fits comfortably with recent work that argues 
that the complexity of processing sentences contributes in essential 
ways to judgments of unacceptability, including some cases that have 
traditionally been categorized as ‘island violations’ (Arnon et al. in 
press; Featherston 2005; Hawkins 1994, 2004). The key idea is that 
unacceptability judgments arise when the complexity of mapping the 
syntactic representation into the corresponding conceptual structure 
representation exceeds a certain threshold (Culicover and Nowak 2002; 
see also Keller 2000 and Kluender 1998, 2004 for related ideas). Using 
this general perspective, I offer some preliminary suggestions as to how 
to measure the complexity of mapping for a number of classical island 
phenomena.

*References*

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Arnon, Inbal, Neal Snider, Philip Hofmeister, T. Florian Jaeger, and 
Ivan A. Sag. In press. Cross-linguistic variation in a processing 
account: The case of multiple wh-questions. BLS 32.

Culicover, Peter W., and Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford, 
Oxford University Press.

Culicover, Peter W., and Ray Jackendoff. 2006. The simpler syntax 
hypothesis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10(9).413-418.

Culicover, Peter W., and Andrzej Nowak. 2002. Learnability, markedness, 
and the complexity of constructions. Language Variation Yearbook, Vol. 
2, ed. by Pierre Pica, and Johan Rooryk, 5-30. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Featherston, Sam. 2005. Universals and grammaticality: Wh-constraints in 
German and English. Linguistics 43(4).

Hawkins, John A. 2004. Complexity and Efficiency in Grammars. Oxford, 
Oxford University Press.

Hawkins, John A. 1994. A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency. 
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Keller, Frank. 2000. Gradience in Grammar: Experimental and 
Computational Aspects of Degrees of Grammaticality. Edinburgh., 
University of Edinburgh.

Kluender, Robert. 1998. On the distinction between strong and weak 
islands: a processing perspective. The Limits of Syntax, ed. by Peter W. 
Culicover, and Louise McNally, 241-279. New York, Academic Press.

Kluender, Robert. 2004. Are subject iIslands subject to a processing 
account? Proceedings of WCCFL 23, ed. by B. Schmeiser, V. Chand, A. 
Kelleher, and A. Rodriguez, 101-125. Somerville, MA:, Cascadilla Press.




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