Some arguments and nonarguments for reductionist accounts of syntactic phenomena

Abstract

Many syntactic phenomena have received competing accounts, either in terms of formal grammatical mechanisms, or in terms of independently motivated properties of language processing mechanisms (“reductionist” accounts). A variety of different types of argument have been put forward in efforts to distinguish these competing accounts. This article critically examines a number of arguments that have been offered as evidence in favour of formal or reductionist analyses, and concludes that some types of argument are more decisive than others. It argues that evidence from graded acceptability effects and from isomorphism between acceptability judgements and on-line comprehension profiles are less decisive. In contrast, clearer conclusions can be drawn from cases of overgeneration, where there is a discrepancy between acceptability judgements and the representations that are briefly constructed on-line, and from tests involving individual differences in cognitive capacity. Based on these arguments, the article concludes that a formal grammatical account is better supported in some domains, and that a reductionist account fares better in other domains. Phenomena discussed include island constraints, agreement attraction, constraints on anaphora, and comparatives.

Keywords:

• Syntax
• Parsing
• Overgeneration

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this paper and many of the studies discussed here was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0196004, BCS-0948554, DGE-0801465). Thanks are due to Brian Dillon, Valentine Hacquard, Dave Kush, Ellen Lau, Shevaun Lewis, Jeff Lidz, Terje Lohndal, Akira Omaki, Roumyana Pancheva, Jon Sprouse, Matt Wagers, Alexis Wellwood, Ming Xiang, Masaya Yoshida, and to two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

¹There are at least two well-known classes of exception to Principle C in English, both of which arise in semantically well-defined contexts. The first class involves comparisons of multiple “guises” of the same individual (Reinhart, 1983; Heim, 1998), as in He _i then did what John _i always did in such situations. The second class of exceptions arises in cases where the embedded clause describes an event that interrupts the main clause event, as in He _i was threatening to leave when Billy _i noticed that the computer had died (Harris & Bates, 2002). Minor modifications to these examples re-introduce the ill-formedness of Principle C violations. Rather than undermining the validity of the Principle C constraint, such cases help to sharpen its formulation. For further discussion, see Kazanina (2005).