Split intransitivity in Japanese is syntactic: Evidence for the Unaccusative Hypothesis from sentence acceptability and truth value judgment experiments

Syntactic Judgment Experiments

Informal judgments of sentence acceptability have long been the primary source of evidence about grammaticality in syntax, and have been controversial just as long. In the past decade, there has been growing interest in collecting and analyzing acceptability judgments according to the formal protocols of experimental psycholinguistics, an approach sometimes called experimental syntax. This arti...

The Truth - Value Judgment Task

The truth-value judgment (TVJ) task has proved to be one of the most illuminating methods of assessing children's linguistic competence developed in recent years. The fundamental property of this task is that it requires the child simply to make a bipolar judgment about whether a statement accurately describes a particular situation alluded to in some context or preamble. The success of the tas...

Split Intransitivity and Saweru

The Distinction Between Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs in Turkish: An Offline and an Eye Tracking Study of Split Intransitivity

The Unaccusativity Hypothesis (UH) holds that intransitive verbs are divided into two broad classes, namely unaccusatives and unergatives. While there is evidence that the UH holds cross-linguistically, it is known that languages do not divide the intransitives into two uniform groups. We investigate the unaccusative-unergative distinction in Turkish by an offline grammaticality judgment task u...

Quantification, prediction, and the online impact of sentence truth-value: Evidence from event-related potentials.

Do negative quantifiers like "few" reduce people's ability to rapidly evaluate incoming language with respect to world knowledge? Previous research has addressed this question by examining whether online measures of quantifier comprehension match the "final" interpretation reflected in verification judgments. However, these studies confounded quantifier valence with its impact on the unfolding ...