Cyclic scope and processing difficulty in a Minimalist parser

Bibliographic Data

ID22130397
AuthorsRobert Pasternak (0000-0002-3024-1900, Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics), Tim Graf (0000-0003-2774-4117, Stony Brook University), Thomas Graf (0009-0006-5624-8373, Stony Brook University)
Year2021
Volume6
Issue1
Publication date2021-01-25
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGlossa a journal of general linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2397-1835 • E-ISSN: 2397-1835
PublisherOpen Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5334/gjgl.1209
OpenAlexW3124347502
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited30

A common view in the theoretical literature is that quantifier raising (QR) is a clause-bounded operation. But in a paper published in Glossa, Wurmbrand (2018) argues that (i) QR is not clause-bounded, and the apparent clause-boundedness of QR is due to the human parser’s difficulty in processing extraclausal QR; and (ii) the relative difficulty of extraclausal QR depends on the size of the embedded clause from which QR takes place. She then proposes a theory of scope processing in which parsing Logical Form (LF) movement is costly for the human parser, which in conjunction with independently motivated assumptions about A′-movement generates the desired results. In this paper, we accept Wurmbrand’s descriptive observations and proposed syntax but offer an alternative, rigorously defined metric of scope processing difficulty that makes precise quantitative predictions. Our proposal is formalized with Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997) and expands recent work by Kobele et al. (2013), among others, that uses this formalism to account for numerous processing phenomena. Our metric correctly handles Wurmbrand’s observations as well as cases that are problematic for her account, and points the way toward an explanatory theory of scope processing

Information retrieval · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Parsing · Programming language · Rule-based machine translation · Syntax · Computer Science · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence

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