Philip Hofmeister

Biographic Data

ID784142
NAMEPhilip Hofmeister
GIVEN NAMESPhilip
FAMILY NAMEHofmeister
SIGNATUREHOFMEISTER P
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of California San Diego
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS5
TOTAL CITATIONS70
AUTHOR COUNT5
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2010
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2015
H-INDEX3

  • Effects of Processing on the Acceptability of "Frozen" Extraposed Constituents

    Open AccessPhilip Hofmeister, Peter W Culicover et al.ARTICLESyntax2015Cited by: 4References: 52

    In syntactic theory, "freezing" refers to the idea that a constituent extraposed to a noncanonical position is resistant to extraction of any of its subconstituents (What did Terry see a movie yesterday about ---?). The unacceptability of such examples, compared to minimally different sentences without extraposition, has been claimed to be a result of a grammatical constraint on dependency formation, such as Ross's (1967) Frozen Structure Constra…

  • How do individual cognitive differences relate to acceptability judgments? A reply to Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips

    Open AccessPhilip Hofmeister, Laura Staum Casasanto et al.ARTICLELanguage2012

    Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012) carried out two experiments in which they measured individual differences in memory to test processing accounts of island effects. They found that these individual differences failed to predict the magnitude of island effects, and they construe these findings as counterevidence to processing-based accounts of island effects. Here, we take up several problems with their methods, their findings, and their conclu…

  • Misapplying working-memory tests

    Open AccessPhilip Hofmeister, Laura Staum Casasanto et al.ARTICLELanguage2012Cited by: 8References: 1

    Misapplying working-memory tests:A reductio ad absurdum* Philip Hofmeister, Laura Staum Casasanto, and Ivan A. Sag The preceding discussion note by Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012b; SWP2) sidesteps the objections we raised in our critique (Hofmeister et al. 2012; HSS) of their 2012a article (SWP1). In the process, they attempt to deflect attention away from the fundamental issue at stake: is the experimental method used by SWP1 an effective d…

  • A linearization account of either … or constructions

    Open AccessPhilip HofmeisterARTICLENatural Language and Linguistic…2010

    To account for the linear freedom of either in disjunction constructions, I expand upon the focus-based account of den Dikken (2006). Word order constraints, in contrast to movement rules or base-generation constraints, provide the mechanism for explaining the distributional data. I argue that all positional variability exhibited by either ultimately derives from a licensing construction that enables either to be shuffled about disjunct-internall…

  • Cognitive constraints and island effects

    Open AccessPhilip Hofmeister, Ivan A SagARTICLELanguage2010Cited by: 58References: 5

    Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that nonstructural manipulations that leave island structures intact can radically alter judgments of island violation…