Cross-linguistic Experiments on Fragmentary Sentences

• Applicant: Professor James Griffiths, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522896622

Linguistic fragments, such as ‘I think himself’ as a response to the question ‘Who shaved Hans?’, are seemingly nonsentential utterances that nevertheless convey full-fledged sentential meaning. Because this meaning can only be obtained by reference to salient information in the discursive context, fragments are context-dependent expressions. Famously, fragments are subject to very stringent licensing conditions, i.e., restrictions on their felicitous use. Linguistic research on frag-ments principally involves determining which licensing conditions are discursive/pragmatic in nature and which are grammatical (i.e., morphosyntactic or compositional-semantic). Determining the cor-rect admixture of pragmatic and grammatical constraints on fragments is highly valuable, as it gives linguists unique insights into the fundamental nature of discourse and grammar and how these two systems interact. The prevailing view in the 2000s-2010s was that the most conspicuous formal re-strictions on fragments (such as whether they permit P-omission, display island-sensitivity, and obey the Major Constituent constraint) are grammatical in nature. In recent years, results obtained via corpus and experimental judgment studies have shown that the empirical foundations underly-ing the prevailing view – which come from informal data collection methods – are an idealization, and that the true empirical picture is more complicated than previously thought. My novel interpre-tation of these results is that the core insight of the prevailing view, namely that the abovemen-tioned restrictions are grammatical in nature, was partly correct, but that the grammar asserts its influence indirectly, by limiting the discourse contexts from which a fragment’s meaning can be retrieved. This interpretation is encapsulated in the Syntactic Question approach (SQA), a new formal theory of fragments that I outlined in an article published in 2019. Since then, my collabora-tors and I have been testing the SQA’s novel predictions, via detailed crosslinguistic research. The current project will continue this endeavour. Specifically, this project will conduct 26 formally ori-ented acceptability judgment experiments on native speakers of English, German, and Turkish (~9 experiments on each). The SQA predicts specific patterns of variance in acceptability judgments when the following variables (among others) are modulated: (i) the clause-type of the fragment’s antecedent, (ii) whether the fragment shows P-omission, (iii) whether the language permits P-stranding (English=yes, German/Turkish=no), (iv) whether the fragment’s correlate is island-bound in the antecedent, (v) whether the language forms wh-questions via wh-fronting (Eng-lish/German=yes, Turkish=no), and (vi) whether the fragment bears presentational or contrastive focus. Our experiments will test these variables (and others) in balanced and controlled web-hosted experiments whose participants will be crowdsourced wherever possible.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants