Frozen by context: Pragmatic factors of syntactic freezing

What it is about

Syntactic freezing is the drop in acceptability when a wh-phrase is extracted from an embedded clause whose DP is also fronted within that clause. The paper tests three accounts. The additive account says freezing is the sum of wh-extraction and DP-fronting. The prosodic account (Culicover and Winkler 2010) says extraction is possible only from a prosodically focused constituent. The pragmatic account says a fronted DP needs a contextually given referent. In Experiment 1.1 (no context) the two syntactic effects add up, with no interaction. In Experiment 1.2 a context with a contrast on the fronted DP and a context with a contrast on the verb both improve fronted sentences by similar amounts, which counts against a purely prosodic account. Production data show speakers do produce the expected contours, and a simplified acceptability task (Experiment 2) gives the same pattern. The authors conclude that pragmatic factors explain part of the effect, with other factors needed for the rest, and the study uses 36 participants in the context experiment.

Ideas

• I1. Pragmatic licence as a rule in prag: a fronted DP is licensed only when a referent matching it is found in the preceding context. Use the coreference sieve (coref/src/sieve.rs) to find the antecedent, and report the rate of licensed fronted DPs over a generated set of frozen-type sentences with and without a preceding sentence that introduces the referent.
• I2. Build the paper's 2x2 design as a test: extraction (yes or no) by fronting (yes or no), each cell a rule outcome of the grammar in 21. The simple clause. Check that the interaction term of the combined score is zero, as the additive account predicts, and run it twice to confirm the output is identical.
• I3. Negative control for the prosodic account: an accent on the verb in the Mova generator must not lift a frozen sentence, while a contextual referent must. Put this control into the test set next to the DP-focus control so that a prosody-only rule is shown to fail.
• I4. Record the freezing judgement as a table of cues (context referent, wh-form, D-linked versus non-D-linked wh-word), in a BTreeMap keyed on the cue. The paper says all of its stimuli are D-linked, so a test with "what" and "who" is the missing comparison and should be added.

For Mova

The chapters are 25. Relative clauses and 26. Questions (wh-extraction), 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (fronting and information structure) and 35. Reference and coreference (the contextual anchor). The code is coref/src/sieve.rs and coref/src/mention.rs for the antecedent, en/src/lin.rs for word order and fronting, and prag/src/roles.rs for the extracted role. The measure is the licence rate on a generated frozen-sentence set with the context and no-context variants, and the interaction term of the 2x2 design.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.5870

@article{martens2021frozen,
  title = {{Frozen by context: Pragmatic factors of syntactic freezing}},
  author = {Martens, Gouming},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5870},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5870}
}

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44. TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Martens, Gouming. 2021. Frozen by context: Pragmatic factors of syntactic freezing. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1): 97. 1–33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/ glossa.5870 ↗ our card
45. Submitted: 26 October 2018 Accepted: 29 June 2021 Published: 25 August 2021 find
46. COPYRIGHT: © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Open Library of Humanities. ↗

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