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Institute
People perceive sentences more favourably after hearing or reading them many times. A prominent approach in linguistic theory argues that these types of exposure effects (satiation effects) show direct evidence of a generative approach to linguistic knowledge: only some sentences improve under repeated exposure, and which sentences do improve can be predicted by a model of linguistic competence that yields natural syntactic classes. However, replications of the original findings have been inconsistent, and it remains unclear whether satiation effects can be reliably induced in an experimental setting at all. Here we report four findings regarding satiation effects in wh-questions across German and English. First, the effects pertain to zone of well-formedness rather than syntactic class: all intermediate ratings, including calibrated fillers, increase at the beginning of the experimental session regardless of syntactic construction. Second, though there is satiation, ratings asymptote below maximum acceptability. Third, these effects are consistent across judgments of superiority effects in English and German. Fourth, wh-questions appear to show similar profiles in English and German, despite these languages being traditionally considered to differ strongly in whether they show effects on movement: violations of the superiority condition can be modulated to a similar degree in both languages by manipulating subject-object initiality and animacy congruency of the wh-phrase. We improve on classic satiation methods by distinguishing between two crucial tests, namely whether exposure selectively targets certain grammatical constructions or whether there is a general repeated exposure effect. We conclude that exposure effects can be reliably induced in rating experiments but exposure does not appear to selectively target certain grammatical constructions. Instead, they appear to be a phenomenon of intermediate gradient judgments.
Two experiments investigated the acceptability of multiple questions. As expected, sentences violating the Superiority Condition were accepted less often than sentences obeying it. The status of the Superiority violations was not improved by the addition of a third wh, regardless of whether the third wh was an adjunct or an argument, though it was improved by the addition of a second question (e.g., and when). Further, in a small pilot study directly comparing a sentence with adjacent final wh-phrases that may induce a stress clash (I'd like to know who hid it where when) with a sentence violating Superiority but avoiding the final adjacent wh-phrases (I'd like to know where who hid it when), half the participants indicated that the Superiority violation sentence sounded better. This suggests that the status of some additional-wh sentences may appear to improve simply because the comparison sentence with adjacent final wh-phrases is degraded. Overall, the results of the studies suggest that there is no need to complicate syntactic theory to account for the additional-wh effect, because there is no general additional-wh effect
Fakten, Fakten, Fakten!
(2004)
It has been claimed that the functional architecture of German clauses involves heads such as [Topic] that are defined by their information structure value, and that movement to the specifier position of such heads is (partially) responsible for free word order in German. This paper argues that this view is misguided. (i) There is no evidence for a syntactically defined topic position in the middle field of German clauses. (ii) The distinction between marked and unmarked serialization must also be made for structures that do not involve movement. (iii) Movement in the interest of information structure is often altruistic
Filling first positions
(2003)