TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Gelman, Andrew
T1  - How to embrace variation and accept uncertainty in linguistic and psycholinguistic data analysis
JF  - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
N2  - The use of statistical inference in linguistics and related areas like psychology typically involves a binary decision: either reject or accept some null hypothesis using statistical significance testing. When statistical power is low, this frequentist data-analytic approach breaks down: null results are uninformative, and effect size estimates associated with significant results are overestimated. Using an example from psycholinguistics, several alternative approaches are demonstrated for reporting inconsistencies between the data and a theoretical prediction. The key here is to focus on committing to a falsifiable prediction, on quantifying uncertainty statistically, and learning to accept the fact that - in almost all practical data analysis situations - we can only draw uncertain conclusions from data, regardless of whether we manage to obtain statistical significance or not. A focus on uncertainty quantification is likely to lead to fewer excessively bold claims that, on closer investigation, may turn out to be not supported by the data.
KW  - experimental linguistics
KW  - statistical data analysis
KW  - statistical
KW  - inference
KW  - uncertainty quantification
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0051
SN  - 0024-3949
SN  - 1613-396X
VL  - 59
IS  - 5
SP  - 1311
EP  - 1342
PB  - De Gruyter Mouton
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vicente, Luis
A1  - Barros, Matthew
A1  - Messick, Troy
A1  - Saab, Andres
T1  - On a nonargument for cleft sources in sluicing
JF  - Linguistic inquiry
N2  - On the basis of certain semantic intuitions, Barros (2012) argues that ellipsis does not require structural isomorphism between elided structure and its antecedent. We tackle this claim. Semantic intuitions cannot be a pointer to the analysis of silent structure. We provide empirical evidence that raises the question of to what extent semantic intuitions about plausible articulable syntax must inform one's analysis of silent structure. We conclude that the answer to this question must be crosslinguistically informed. We conjecture that ellipsis introduces ellipsis-specific interpretive mechanisms, so that intuitions about "how the unelided structure would be interpreted" are not empirically relevant.
KW  - sluicing
KW  - contextual restriction
KW  - ellipsis identity
KW  - inheritance of
KW  - content
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00390
SN  - 0024-3892
SN  - 1530-9150
VL  - 52
IS  - 4
SP  - 867
EP  - 880
PB  - MIT Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Yadav, Himanshu
A1  - Husain, Samar
A1  - Futrell, Richard
T1  - Do dependency lengths explain constraints on crossing dependencies?
JF  - Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal
N2  - In syntactic dependency trees, when arcs are drawn from syntactic heads to dependents, they rarely cross. Constraints on these crossing dependencies are critical for determining the syntactic properties of human language, because they define the position of natural language in formal language hierarchies. We study whether the apparent constraints on crossing syntactic dependencies in natural language might be explained by constraints on dependency lengths (the linear distance between heads and dependents). We compare real dependency trees from treebanks of 52 languages against baselines of random trees which are matched with the real trees in terms of their dependency lengths. We find that these baseline trees have many more crossing dependencies than real trees, indicating that a constraint on dependency lengths alone cannot explain the empirical rarity of crossing dependencies. However, we find evidence that a combined constraint on dependency length and the rate of crossing dependencies might be able to explain two of the most-studied formal restrictions on dependency trees: gap degree and well-nestedness.
KW  - crossing dependencies
KW  - dependency length
KW  - dependency treebanks
KW  - efficiency
KW  - language processing
KW  - syntax
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0070
SN  - 2199-174X
VL  - 7
PB  - De Gruyter Mouton
CY  - Berlin ; New York, NY
ER  -