Syntactic Complexity Phenomena Are Better Explained Without Empty Elements Mediating Long-Distance Dependencies

Abstract

We report the results of two acceptability judgment experiments on English materials, which were designed in order to help disentangle predictions of syntactic theories with transformations from nontransformational theories. The materials in these experiments were motivated from examples from Pickering & Barry (1991), who provided intuitive evidence that there is little processing cost for connecting a fronted prepositional phrase to its verb, even if it is the second postverbal argument of a verb in the declarative form. For example, the PP on which connects to the verb put in the sentence This is the saucer on which Mary put the cup into which she poured the milk. If there is a transformation of phrases from declarative structures to interrogative structures (as proposed in Chomsky (1957) and all versions of related theories since), then there is a long-distance connection between the fronted PP and its base position following the NP object, for example, the cup into which she poured the milk, which is not complete until the end of the sentence. In contrast, in a theory without transformations, the PP can be directly associated with its role-assigning verb put when this verb is encountered. If there is cost for processing making dependency connections that is proportional to their distances, then transformational theories predict a large processing cost for this kind of structure, relative to controls. In contrast, nontransformational theories predict no large cost. The results of the two rating experiments consistently supported the predictions of the non-transformational theories relative to those of the transformational theories. We argue that, in line with other current evidence, the nontransformational theories appear to better support the available empirical data.

Keywords: Acceptability judgment; Empty categories; Filler‐gap constructions; Long distance dependencies; Sentence processing; Syntax.

Fig. 1

Mean ratings by item (dots) and by condition (squares). Participants = 39, items = 20, observations = 780. Error bars represent standard error.

Fig. 2

Mean estimate of the ${\beta }_{\mathrm{NPFiller}}1$ posterior across items. Error bars represent 95% CrI.

Fig. 3

Mean ratings by item (dots) and by condition (squares). Participants = 40, items = 23, observations = 920. Error bars represent standard error.

Fig. 4

Relation between dependency length and acceptability across two experiments. We include the short and long interrogative versions from E2, which are roughly matched for length with the items from E1. We omit the declarative conditions, as they do not distinguish the two theories, and the baseline conditions, as they are much shorter sentences (acceptability ratings are highly sensitive to sentence length: longer sentences being rated less acceptable, as long as they are grammatical).The theory without empty categories—right panel—shows a close relationship between dependency length and acceptability rating: as dependency lengths get longer, the ratings get lower. In contrast, the theory with empty categories—left panel—shows no correlation with dependency length: the acceptability varies, but dependency length does not predict these ratings.

Fig. A.1

Mean ratings by item (dots) and by condition (squares). Participants = 38, items = 16, observations = 608. Error bars represent standard error.