Superiority in English and German

Cross-Language Grammatical Differences

Bibliographic Data

ID5019141
AuthorsJana Häussler (University of Potsdam Department Linguistik Karl‐Liebknecht‐Str. 24‐25 D‐14476 Potsdam Germany), Margaret Grant (0000-0002-3800-8193, University of Toronto), Maggie Grant (0000-0003-4077-5890, University of Toronto Department of Linguistics Sidney Smith Hall 100 St. George St. Toronto ON M5S 3G3 Canada), Gisbert Fanselow (0000-0002-1877-865X, University of Potsdam Department Linguistik Karl‐Liebknecht‐Str. 24‐25 D‐14476 Potsdam Germany), Lyn Frazier (0000-0001-7145-3259, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Department of Linguistics South College Amherst MA 01003 USA)
Year2015
Volume18
Issue3
Pages235-265
Publication date2015-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSyntax (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1368-0005 • E-ISSN: 1467-9612
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/synt.12030
OpenAlexW1580250905
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited40

Do the grammars of English and German contain a ban on moving the lower of two wh-phrases (Superiority), or is the lower acceptability due simply to the complexity of processing the longer dependency that results when the lower wh-phrase is moved? The results of four acceptability-judgment studies suggest that a pure processing account is inadequate. Crossing wh-dependencies lower the acceptability of both German and English questions but with a significantly larger penalty in English than in German (experiment 1). The larger penalty in English cannot be attributed to greater sensitivity to violations in English, because relative clause island violations result in similar effects in the two languages (experiment 2). A pure processing account might claim long dependencies are easier to process in German than in English because of richer case, but a control experiment did not support this possibility (experiment 4). We suggest that moving the lower of two wh-phrases is banned in the grammar of English but not in the grammar of German. This predicts that there should be a penalty for crossing dependencies in English even in helpful (Bolinger) contexts, as confirmed in experiment 3, and even in short easy-to-process sentences, as confirmed by simple six-word sentences in Clifton, Fanselow & Frazier 2006. Finally, if German grammar does not contain a ban on crossing, it is not surprising that the penalty in German is smaller than in English or that like animacy of the two wh-phrases plays a larger role in German than in English because feature similarity generally gives rise to difficulty in processing, whereas in English a grammatical ban on crossing will reduce acceptability regardless of whether there is processing difficulty

English grammar · German · Grammar · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Noun · Noun phrase · Phrase · Rule-based machine translation · Computer Science · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Philosophy · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence

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