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Grammaticality Judgments

Why Does Anyone Object to Subject Extraction?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Jacquelyn Schachter  and
Virginia Yip
Jacquelyn Schachter
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
Virginia Yip
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Abstract

Grammaticality judgments reflect a compound product of both grammatical and processing factors. But because they interact in a symbiotic way, very often grammatical and processing constraints are difficult to separate. According to generally accepted grammatical theory, (a) Who do you think John told Mary he fell in love with? and (b) Who do you think John told Mary fell in love with Sue? are equally grammatical. We have observed, however, that native speakers strongly accept sentences like (a) as grammatical but react quite variably to sentences like (b). A possible explanation is that native English speakers exhibit a processing preference, in searching for the extraction site for the wh- word, for object position over subject position. Proficient nonnative judgmental data offer additional support for a processing account. Nonnatives whose L1 grammars do not bias them toward objects also show preferences similar to those of natives. We provide a processing account based on Frazier's Minimal Attachment principle.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 1990 , pp. 379 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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