Cross-linguistic Variation in a Processing Account: The Case of Multiple Wh-questions
نویسندگان
چکیده
0. Introduction The distinction between acceptable and unacceptable sentences has long served as the empirical basis for theoretical linguistics. Traditionally, two kinds of explanations have been offered to account for perceived unacceptability. In the first, unacceptability reflects the violation of grammatical constraints. The second explanation attributes unacceptability to processing complexity: a construction is judged unacceptable because it is hard to process. The unacceptability of nested constructions like (1) has been attributed to their extreme processing complexity (Gibson 2000; Miller & Chomsky 1963). The acceptability of this construction improves when the processing load is reduced by replacing the lexical NPs with pronouns, as in (2).
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