Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures

Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F26%3AHPRVA29B" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/26:HPRVA29B - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106265" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106265</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106265" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106265</a>

Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures
Original language description
The factors that affect the acceptability of long-distance extractions have long been debated, with multiple accounts proposed. Liu et al. (2022) proposed a succinct probability-based account of a sub-class of these kinds of materials, wh-questions with long-distance dependencies across sentence-complement verbs (e.g., “What did Mary whine that John bought?”). The explanation that they proposed was that the acceptability of such sentences depends on the probability of the verb-frame of the intermediate verb (e.g., “whine that”). In the current work, we evaluate some potentially simpler probability-based accounts on Liu et al.'s original data set, and show how an alternative (but also probability-based) approach accounts for the data better. We replicate their experiment and conduct the same analysis on the new dataset, finding the same results. Finally, we apply the same analysis to wh-questions with predicate adjectives (e.g., “What was Mary glad that John bought?”), and again find similar results. We conclude that the acceptability of such constructions is higher the more probable the words and constructions that make up the sentence are. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Type
J<sub>SC</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the SCOPUS database
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Publication year
2025
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

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