As you might know, I love reanalyzing linguistic phenomena in terms of monotonicity (see this earlier post, my JLM paper, and this NELS paper by my student Sophie Moradi). I’m now in the middle of writing another paper on this topic, and it currently includes a section on freezing effects. You see, freezing effects are obviously just bog-standard monotonicity, and I’m shocked that nobody else has pointed that out before. But perhaps the reason nobody’s pointed that out before is simple: my understanding of freezing effects does not match the facts. In the middle of writing the paper, I realized that I don’t know just how much freezing effects limit movement. So I figured I’d reveal my ignorance to the world and hopefully crowd source some sorely needed insight.

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