Dabrowska 2008c
Dabrowska 2008c
Dabrowska 2008c
A usage-based perspective
EWA DA˛BROWSKA*
Abstract
1. Introduction
Questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies
(henceforth LDDs) have played an important role in the development of
syntactic theory, especially in the generative framework. Such structures
* This study was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number
AH/F001924/1). I would like to thank Adele Goldberg, Marcin Szczerbiński and two
anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Mike Pin-
combe for help with data collection. Address for correspondence: School of English Lit-
erature, Language and Linguistics, University of She‰eld, She‰eld S10 2TN, United
Kingdom. E-mail: e.dabrowska@shef.ac.uk.
(1) a. What will John claim that you did ? (Culicover 1997: 184)
b. Which problem does John know (that) Mary solved ?
(Ouhalla 1994: 72)
c. Whom do you believe that Lord Emsworth will invite ?
(Haegeman 1991: 342)
d. Who did Mary hope that Tom would tell Bill that he should
visit ? (Chomsky 1977: 74)
e. Which problem do you think (that) Jane believes (that) Bill
claims (that) Mary solved ? (Ouhalla 1994: 71)
(2) a. And how do you think you’d spell classical like do you like clas-
sical music? (FMG 725)
b. Why’d why do you think why do you think it is that there
wasn’t that motivation? (FY8 201)
c. What is it and why do you think it looks like that? (JJS 882)
d. What do you think Brian’ll say? (KE1 256)
e. What did they say it meant? (KD0 622)
These ‘‘real life’’ LDD questions are much more stereotypical than the
sentences in (1). The textbook examples contain a variety of matrix sub-
jects and verbs and di¤erent auxiliaries; most of them also contain an
overt complementizer and two involve a dependency over more than one
intervening clause. In the corpus sentences, in contrast, the matrix subject
is usually you, the matrix verb think or say, and the auxiliary do; there are
no other elements in the matrix clause, no complementizer, and only one
complement clause. In fact, almost 70 percent of the LDD questions with
finite complement clauses in the spoken part of the BNC have the form
WH do you think S-GAP? or WH did NP say S-GAP?, where S-GAP is
a subordinate clause with a missing constituent. Most of the remaining
questions are minimal variations on these patterns: that is to say, they
contain a di¤erent matrix subject or a di¤erent verb or a di¤erent auxil-
iary or an additional element like an adverbial or complementizer. Only
Questions with long-distance dependencies 393
6 percent depart from the prototype in more than one respect (Da˛brow-
ska in press a; see also Da˛browska 2004 and Verhagen 2005).1
This has lead some researchers in the usage-based framework (Da˛b-
rowska 2004, Verhagen 2005) to hypothesise that speakers’ knowledge
about such constructions is best explained in terms of relatively specific,
low level templates—WH do you think S-GAP? and WH did you say S-
GAP?—rather than in terms of abstract rules and principles of the type
proposed by formal linguists (see, for example Cheng and Corver 2006;
Chomsky 1977; Levine and Hukari 2006).2 Declaratives with verb com-
plement clauses, in contrast, are much more varied—the main clauses
take di¤erent subjects, auxiliaries and verbs, and often contain additional
elements (Da˛browska in press a; Verhagen 2005)—as a result of which
language learners develop more general representations for this construc-
tion in addition to lexically specific templates for frequent combinations
such as I think S, I don’t think S, I mean S.
However, conclusions about speakers’ mental representations based on
the fact that a particular structure is rare or not attested at all in a corpus
are problematic, since this could be merely a result of sampling. Even
with a large and balanced corpus, sentences which are perfectly compati-
ble with speakers’ mental grammars may be unattested simply because
they are pragmatically implausible. In short, while restricted patterns of
usage are suggestive, they do not license strong conclusions about mental
representation: the observational data need to be corroborated by experi-
mental studies.
According to the usage-based proposals put forward by Da˛browska
and Verhagen, prototypical LDD questions are produced simply by in-
serting new material into the appropriate slots in a pre-existing template.
Non-prototypical LDD questions such as What does she hope she’ll get?
require additional work, since the speaker has to adapt the template—in
this case, substitute she for you and hope for think, and modify the auxil-
iary so that it agrees with the subject. To be able to do this, the speaker
would have to construct a proportional analogy such as the one in (3),
3. For ease of expositions, I have assumed that the source expression for the analogy is an
actual expression rather than the template; but this need not be the case.
4. Reliance on analogy and schema use are not as di¤erent as it might at first seem. As
Langacker points out, applying analogy requires the speaker to apprehend an abstract
commonality between the source and target forms; and the abstract commonality, of
course, is what would be captured by the schema (Langacker 2000: 60; see also Da˛brow-
ska 2008). Furthermore, repeated use of analogy will result in the ‘‘abstract commonal-
ity’’ being entrenched until it becomes a linguistic unit in its own right. The critical dif-
ference between the two processes, then, is whether the relevant knowledge is retrieved
from memory or created ‘‘on the fly’’.
Questions with long-distance dependencies 395
2. Experimental design
Da˛browska (2004) reports on a preliminary study showing that speakers
rate prototypical LDD questions such as Where do you think they sent the
documents? and What did you say the burglars stole? as more acceptable
than questions which had lexical subjects, a main verb other than think
or say, and an auxiliary other than do (e.g., Where will the customers
remember they sent the documents? What have the police revealed the
burglars stole?). There was no corresponding e¤ect for declaratives. It is
not clear, however, whether the di¤erence in speakers’ judgments was
due to the choice of subject, verb, or auxiliary, or some combination
of these factors. The experiment described in this paper was designed to
investigate how each of these three factors individually contributes to
speakers’ judgment. It will also examine two additional grammatical fac-
tors: the presence or absence of a complementizer and the number of
clauses intervening between the WH word and the gap, as well as the
e¤ects of plausibility and syntactic complexity.
In the experiment, native speakers of English completed a written ques-
tionnaire in which they were asked to rate the acceptability of LDD ques-
tions of varying degrees of prototypicality. There were seven experimental
conditions:
1. Prototypical LDD questions (WH Prototypical): These had the form
WH do you think S-GAP? or WH did you say S-GAP?;
2. LDD questions with lexical matrix subjects (WH Subject);
3. LDD questions with auxiliaries other than do (WH Auxiliary);
396 E. Da˛browska
4. LDD questions with matrix verbs other than think or say (WH Verb);
5. LDD questions with overt complementizers (WH Complementizer);
6. LDD questions with ‘‘very long’’ dependencies, i.e., with an addi-
tional complement clause (WH Long);
7. Unprototypical LDD questions (WH Unprototypical): These had a
lexical subject, an auxiliary other than do, and a main verb other than
think or say, an overt complementizer, and an additional complement
clause.
The questionnaire also contained two types of control sentences.
Grammatical controls were declarative versions of the LDD questions
constructed by replacing the WH word with a noun phrase or a preposi-
tional phrase (and adding a conjunction: see below). Ungrammatical
controls involved four types of structures: that trace violations (*That),
sentences involving a dependency reaching into a complex NP (*Com-
plexNP), negative sentences without do support (*Not), and negative sen-
tences with double tense marking (*DoubleTn). Examples of each type of
sentence are provided in Table 1; a complete list of all sentences used in
one version of the questionnaire is given in the Appendix.
3. Predictions
3.1. General rules
If speakers have the competence attributed to them by generative lin-
guists, and if their grammaticality judgments are a more or less direct re-
flection of this competence, then we could expect the following prediction
to hold:
Prediction 1: Grammatical sentences should receive ratings close to 5;
ungrammatical sentences should be rated about 1.
Condition Example
1. WH Prototypical What do you think the witness will say if they don’t intervene?
2. WH Subject What does Claire think the witness will say if they don’t
intervene?
3. WH Auxiliary What would you think the witness will say if they don’t
intervene?
4. WH Verb What do you believe the witness will say if they don’t
intervene?
5. WH Complementizer What do you think that the witness will say if they don’t
intervene?
6. WH Long What do you think Jo believes he said at the court hearing?
7. WH Unprototypical What would Claire believe that Jo thinks he said at the court
hearing?
Grammatical controls
1. DE Prototypical But you think the witness will say something if they don’t
intervene.
2. DE Subject And Claire thinks the witness will say something if they don’t
intervene.
3. DE Auxiliary You would think the witness will say something if they don’t
intervene.
4. DE Verb So you believe the witness will say something if they don’t
intervene.
4. DE Complementizer So you think that the witness will say something if they don’t
intervene.
5. DE Long So you think Jo believes he said something at the court
hearing.
6. DE Unprototypical Claire would believe that Jo thinks he said something at the
court hearing.
Ungrammatical Controls
*That *What did you say that works even better?
*Complex NP *What did Claire make the claim that she read in a book?
*Not *Her husband not claimed they asked where we were going.
*DoubleTn *His cousin doesn’t thinks we lied because we were afraid.
properties of the matrix subject: specifically, speakers may assign low rat-
ings to declaratives with second person subjects, but accept the corre-
sponding interrogatives.
Taking processing demands and pragmatics into consideration, one
might make the following predictions:
Prediction 2: WH questions (WH) will receive lower ratings than the
corresponding declaratives (DE):
DE Protototypical > WH Prototypical
DE Subject > WH Subject
398 E. Da˛browska
in, while verbs are non-autonomous in the sense that their descriptions
must make reference to the entities participating in the relationship they
designate—in other words, these entities are part of the verb’s profile (cf.
Langacker 1987: 298¤ ). Likewise, tensed auxiliaries, as grounding predi-
cations (cf. Langacker 1991: 193¤ ), conceptually presuppose the events
that they ground—designated by the verb plus its arguments. It follows
that nominals should be more easily substitutable than verbs, which in
turn should be more easily substitutable than auxiliaries.
4. Method
4.1. Stimuli
4.1.1. Experimental sentences. The experimental sentences were con-
structed by combining a ‘‘sentence stub’’ with a completion consisting of
either a complement clause and an adverbial clause or two complement
400 E. Da˛browska
clauses (see below). The stubs for the WH Prototypical condition were as
follows:
(4) a. What do you think . . .
b. Where do you think . . .
c. What did you say . . .
d. Where did you say . . .
The stubs for the non-prototypical sentences were constructed by
changing or adding the relevant element. Thus, in the WH Subject condi-
tion, you was changed to a proper name (and a third person ending was
added to the auxiliary so that it agreed with the subject); in the WH Aux-
iliary condition, do was changed to will or would; in the WH Verb condi-
tion, think was replaced with believe or suspect and say with claim or
swear; in the WH Complementizer condition, an overt complementizer
(that) was added after the verb; and in the WH Unprototypical condition,
all of the above changes were made.5
The completions for conditions 1–5 consisted of a four word comple-
ment clause followed by a four-word adverbial clause, e.g.,
The completions for sentences with very long dependencies (i.e., condi-
tions 6 and 7) consisted of a two-word complement clause followed by a
pronominal subject, verb, and a four-word prepositional phrase, e.g.,
(6) (What do you think) Jo believes
(stub) (first complement clause)
he said at the court hearing?
(second complement clause)
Thus, all experimental sentences without complementizers were 12
words long and contained three clauses, with seven words intervening be-
tween the WH word and the gap. Sentences with complementizers were
13 words long, with 8 words between the WH word and the gap.
There were two versions of the questionnaire, and two sets of comple-
tions. In version 1, the stubs were combined with completion set 1 in con-
5. Throughout this paper, I use the term non-prototypical to refer to questions which di¤er
in some respect from the prototypical instances of the construction, and the term unpro-
totypical to refer to questions which di¤er from the prototype in all relevant respects.
Questions with long-distance dependencies 401
(13) *Her husband not claimed they asked where we were going.
(14) *The girl doesn’t remembers where she spent her summer holidays.
The same ungrammatical controls were used in both versions of the
questionnaire. There were four sentences in each condition, giving a total
of 16 ungrammatical controls.
4.2. Participants
38 second and third year literature students from the School of English at
the University of Newcastle participated in the experiment. All were na-
tive speakers of English.
Note: 3 indicates that a prediction has been confirmed; 7 indicates that a prediction has
not been confirmed; 77indicates a significant di¤erence in the opposite direction.
* Di¤erence scores were computed by subtracting the rating of the declarative control from
the rating of the interrogative sentence.
ber of frequent bigrams and the advantage for questions over declaratives
(questions containing more high-frequency bigrams are not necessarily
better than the corresponding declaratives). Furthermore, bigram fre-
quency cannot explain the interaction between construction type and
verb or between construction type and complementizer (see below), since
the words immediately preceding and following the verb and the comple-
mentizer were the same in both the declarative and the interrogative var-
iants. In fact, for sentences with complementizers, bigram frequency
makes precisely the wrong predictions. In the WH Prototypical and DE
Prototypical conditions, the main clause verb (think or say) was followed
by the pronoun they or we or the determiner the, while in the WH Com-
plementizer and DE Complementizer conditions, it was followed by the
complementizer that. The mean frequency of the bigrams think the, think
they, think we, say the, say they, say we in the British National Corpus is
2539, while the mean frequency of the bigrams think that and say that is
9473. Thus, if acceptability ratings were simply a reflection of bigram fre-
quency, sentences with complementizers should receive higher ratings
than sentences without them. (The mean frequency of the bigrams that
they, that the and that we is even higher: 59333.) However, as we will see
in section 5.2.4, the ratings for WH questions with complementizers were
Questions with long-distance dependencies 407
considerably lower than for the prototypical variants, while there was no
di¤erence in the acceptability of the corresponding declaratives.
Note: Only significant main e¤ects and interactions are listed in the table.
6. We know from the psycholinguistic literature that overt complementizers facilitate pro-
cessing, presumably because they signal the presence of a subordinate clause and thus
help the processor to avoid garden path e¤ects: for instance, sentences with complement
clauses introduced by a complementizer are read faster than sentences without comple-
mentizers, even when the main clause verb has a strong preference for clausal comple-
ments (Trueswell et al. 1993, Holmes et al. 1989). Thus the presence of the complemen-
tizer e¤ect for questions provides strong evidence in favour of lexical storage of the
whole construction.
Questions with long-distance dependencies 413
6. Conclusion
The most striking result of the experiment reported here is the existence of
strong prototypicality e¤ects for LDD questions. Prototypical instances
of this construction, i.e., those which fit one of the templates postulated
on the basis of corpus research (WH do you think S-GAP?, WH did you
say S-GAP?) were judged to be the most acceptable of all sentences. De-
partures from the prototype (use of a di¤erent auxiliary or verb in the
matrix clause, addition of a complementizer or an extra complement
clause) resulted in lower acceptability ratings. Crucially, there was no cor-
responding e¤ect on declaratives, so the di¤erences in grammaticality
cannot be attributed simply to the properties of the lexical items used in
the experiment. Acceptability also depended on the type of substitution
required: nominals are apparently easier to substitute than verbs, which
in turn were easier than auxiliaries.
The participants’ judgments were also influenced by pragmatic consid-
erations: declaratives with lexical subjects (DE Subject, e.g., So Steve said
the children could stay here when their father returns) were judged to be
more acceptable than declaratives with second person subjects (DE Pro-
totypical, e.g., So you said the children could stay here when their father
returns). This e¤ect, however, was fairly small in comparison with the
purely lexical e¤ects.
Adding an additional complement clause also reduced the acceptability
of the questions (and had the opposite e¤ect on declaratives). This could
be attributed to the greater processing demands posed by the increased
Questions with long-distance dependencies 417
syntactic distance between the filler and the gap, since the filler must be
held in working memory while the pre-gap part of the sentence is being
processed. However, questions with very long dependencies (with two
clause boundaries intervening between the filler and the gap) were not
consistently judged to be less acceptable than questions involving depen-
dencies across only one clause boundary; and the e¤ect of adding an ad-
ditional complement clause was no bigger than that of adding a comple-
mentizer or changing the matrix verb. Thus, appealing to prototypicality
e¤ects provides a more parsimonious explanation for these findings. This
is not to say that the processing demands of holding the filler in memory
have no e¤ect on processing—but the costs may be relatively small com-
pared the e¤ects of prototypicality.7
Interestingly, unprototypical LDD questions—those with a comple-
mentizer, an additional verb complement clause, a lexical subject, a
modal auxiliary, and a verb other than think or say in the main clause—
were judged to be just as bad as that-trace violations and sentences with
double tense/agreement marking (though better than sentences involving
‘‘extraction’’ out of a complex NP and negatives without an auxiliary).
This is consonant with the results of two acceptability experiments con-
ducted by Kluender and Kutas (1993). In their first experiment, in which
participants were required to provided speeded categorical acceptability
judgments, LDD questions were accepted only 54 percent of the time. In
the second experiment, participants rated acceptability on a scale from 1
to 40, and could take as much time as they wished to make the judgment.
The mean acceptability rating for LDD questions was 19—significantly
higher than that for WH island variations, but much lower than those
for Y/N questions containing complement clauses. Kluender and Kutas
conclude that the low acceptability of LDD questions is attributable to
the processing demands of holding the filler in working memory. How-
ever, since their stimuli were quite di¤erent from prototypical LDD ques-
tions (they all contained overt complementizers and non-prototypical
verbs; some also had lexical subjects or auxiliaries other than do), it could
also be explained by appealing to their unprototypicality.
So what does the presence of prototypicality e¤ects in acceptability
judgments about LDD questions—in particular, those due to the lexical
7. Acceptability judgment and ease of processing are of course two di¤erent things, al-
though they tend to be correlated: other things being equal, sentences which are di‰cult
to process tend to be judged less acceptable (cf. Fanselow and Frisch 2006; Frazier and
Clifton 1989; Kluender and Kutas 1993). Note, too, that unprototypical LDD questions
contain more dysfluencies than prototypical instances of the construction (Da˛browska
forthc.), which also suggests that they are more di‰cult to process.
418 E. Da˛browska
10. There is some work on lexical e¤ects on acceptability judgments in basic argument
structure constructions: see Theakston 2004, Ambridge et al. in press. In both studies,
speakers judged argument structure violations with high frequency verbs (e.g., *I
poured you with water) as less acceptable than argument structure violations with low
frequency verbs (e.g., *I dribbled teddy with water); the authors explain this by appeal-
ing to the higher entrenchment of the pattern with the frequent verb. Ambridge et al.
(2008) also found that fully grammatical sentences with high frequency verbs were
judged slightly more acceptable than sentences with low-frequency verbs, although the
di¤erence was very small (for adults, 4.82 v. 4.76; the authors do not indicate whether
or not it was statistically significant).
11. Note that constructing examples for a linguistic paper (or for one’s students to analyse)
is a very di¤erent kind of activity from ordinary language use: it is conscious and delib-
erate, and relies on metalinguistic and/or general problem-solving abilities rather than
normal linguistic routines.
420 E. Da˛browska
As a result, they are much more likely to develop more general represen-
tations of these constructions, and accept unprototypical instances of
them.12
12. For other work suggesting that linguists’ judgments may be systematically di¤erent
from those of ordinary speakers, see Spencer 1973 and Bradac et al. 1980. See also
Hiramatsu 1999 and Snyder 2000 for experimental studies of ‘‘syntactic satiation’’, a
phenomenon whereby sentences which were initially judged ungrammatical become
increasingly acceptable as a result of repeated exposure.
Questions with long-distance dependencies 421
Where do you think that the children could stay when their father
returns?
LDD question with an additional subordinate clause (WH Long)
What did you say Eve claimed we bought during our first visit?
What do you think Jo believes he said at the court hearing?
Where did you say Mike swore he went after the evening performance?
Where do you think Phil suspects we were during the last war?
Unprototypical LDD question (WH Unprototypical)
What will Steve believe that Jo thinks they did with their old furniture?
What would Claire claim that Eve said they know about the whole a¤air?
Where will Andy suspect that Phil thinks they stayed during the school
holidays?
Where would Paul swear that Mike said they were during the afternoon
session?
Grammatical control sentences
‘‘Prototypical’’ declarative (DE Prototypical)
And you think the children could stay here when their father returns.
But you think they decided to do something when they got home
So you said the family should know everything before they go there.
So you said they hid the treasure somewhere when they found out.
Declarative with lexical subject (DE Subject)
And Claire thinks the witness will say something if they don’t intervene.
But Steve said we bought something for Alice when we visited her.
So Andy said the young man went home after they found her.
So Paul thinks we put the documents back after he saw them.
Declarative with a di¤erent verb (DE Verb)
And you swore the young man went home after they found her.
But you suspect we put the documents back after he saw them.
So you believe the witness will say something if they don’t intervene.
So you claimed we bought something for Alice when we visited her.
Declarative with a di¤erent auxiliary (DE Auxiliary)
You will say the family should know everything before they go there.
You will say they hid the treasure somewhere when they found out.
You would think the children could stay here when their father returns.
You would think they decided to do something when they got home.
Declarative with an overt complementizer (DE Complementizer)
And you said that the family should know everything before they go
there.
422 E. Da˛browska
But you think that the children could stay here when their father returns.
So you said that they hid the treasure somewhere when they found out.
So you think that they decided to do something when they got home.
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