Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités.

Description du séminaire Print

Titre Local and Universal
Conférencier Nino Grillo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Date mardi 08 mai 2012
Heure 12h15
Salle L208 (Bâtiment Candolle)
Description

Attachment Preferences: Cuetos and Mitchell (1988), and much subsequent work, show that speakers of different languages differ in Relative Clause attachment preferences in complex NPs of the form NP1 P NP2: Low Attachment (LA) is found in English (1a), and High Attachment (HA) in Spanish (1b).

(1) a. I saw the son1 of the man2 that EC2 was running.
     b. Vi al hijo1 del hombre2 que EC1 corría.

Various factors (prosody, length of RC/breaks, position of complex NP, context, type of relative pronoun, a.o.) modulate preferences within a language, but crosslinguistic distinctions still prevail (Fernández. 2003). These findings questioned the universality of parsing principles as Right Association (Kimball 1973; Phillips 1996)/Late Closure (Frazier 1979)/Recency (Gibson 1991), and raised important problems for language acquisition (Fodor. 1998a,b).

In this talk, I will discuss a new argument for the universality of parsing preferences by showing that variation across, and within, languages stems from structural differences: the availability of Pseudo Relatives (PR). Novel experimental evidence and previous results from the literature will be presented in support of this claim.-

 
   
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