In February I had a nice chat with Bob Frank and Tim Hunter regarding their SCiL paper on comparing tree-construction methods across mildly context-sensitive formalisms. Among other things, this paper reiterates the received view that MGs cannot handle unbounded multiple wh-movement. That is certainly true for standard MGs as defined in Stabler (1997), but my argument was that this is due to what may now be considered an idiosyncrasy of the definition. We can relax that definition to allow for multiple wh-movement while preserving essential formal properties of MGs. However, friendly chats aren’t a good format for explaining this in detail, so I promised them an Outdex post with some math. Well, 5 months later, I finally make good on my promise.

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I know I promised you guys a follow-up post on logical transductions and the status of representations, but I just have to get this out first because it’s been gnawing at me for a few weeks now. There’s been some limitations of the subregular view of syntax in terms of movement tiers, and I think I’ve found a solution, one that somehow ends up looking a bit like the system in Beyond Explanatory Adequacy. The thing is, my solution is so simple that I fear I’m missing something very basic, some clear-cut empirical phenomenon that completely undermines my purported solution. So, syntacticians, this is your opportunity to sink my current love child in the comments section…

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As a student I didn’t care much for work on syntactic parsing since I figured all the exciting big-picture stuff is in the specification of possible syntactic structures, not how we infer these structures from strings. It’s a pretty conventional attitude, widely shared by syntacticians and a natural corollary of the competence-performance split — or so it seems. But as so often, what seems plausible and obvious at first glance quickly falls apart when you probe deeper. Even if you don’t care one bit about syntactic processing, parsing questions still have merit because they quickly turn into questions about syntactic architecture. This is best illustrated with a concrete example, in that abstract sense of “concrete” that everyone’s so fond of here at the outdex headquarters.

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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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This is a very short follow-up to my previous post on circumambient patterns in syntax. I just realized that there’s another, very robust example that makes all the cases look even more mundane: complementizer alternations in English relative clauses.

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Last week I gave an invited talk at UMass on the subregular program and the computational parallels it reveals between syntax and phonology. If you’re curious, the slides are on my website. The talk went over a lot better than I expected, and there were lots of great questions. UMass has a tradition of letting students ask questions first before the faculty get to chime in, and the students were relentless in a good way. I think there was only 5 minutes left for faculty questions at the end. It was a great experience, and probably the best question period I’ve ever been on the receiving end of.

Anyways, after the colloquium Brian Dillon asked a few questions about more complex movement cases, and those are very interesting because they’re yet another instance of computational parallelism between phonology and syntax: tone plateauing = movement-driven complementizer agreement.

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