Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T23:25:19.609Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

19 - Acceptability Studies in Semitic Languages

from Part III - Experimental Studies of Specific Populations and Language Families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Aya Meltzer-Asscher
Edited by
Grant Goodall
Grant Goodall
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Get access

Summary

Formal acceptability experiments are particularly important for languages with smaller communities of linguists, including most Semitic languages. However, experimental studies of sentence acceptability in this language family are still rare, and focus on very few phenomena (notably wh-dependencies) and languages (mostly Arabic and Hebrew). This chapter reviews the extant literature on acceptability studies in Semitic languages. Special attention is given to studies on island constraints, resumptive pronouns – a conspicuous feature of Semitic –and their interaction, revealing a complex pattern of results. The scant literature on agreement and ditransitive structures is also discussed. The review also highlights some unexplored topics in Semitic syntax, which will benefit from future experimental work, including free word order, verbless sentences, and construct states. Finally, the chapter outlines some of the challenges facing researchers conducting experimental work in Semitic, including issues of diglossia, as well as technical challenges relating to script, online databases, and participant recruitment.

Keywords

acceptabilitySemitic languageswh-dependenciesisland constraintsresumptive pronounsagreementditransitive structures
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax , pp. 505 - 533
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ackerman, L., Frazier, M., & Yoshida, M. (2018). Resumptive pronouns can ameliorate illicit island extractions. Linguistic Inquiry, 49, 847–859.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexopoulou, T. & Keller, F. (2007). Locality, cyclicity, and resumption: At the interface between the grammar and the human sentence processor. Language, 83, 110–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Al-Horais, N. (2006). Arabic verbless sentences: Is there a null VP? Pragmalinguistica, 14, 101–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Almeida, D. (2014). Subliminal wh-islands in Brazilian Portuguese and the consequences for syntactic theory. Revista da ABRALIN, 13, 55–93.Google Scholar
Aoun, J. E., Benmamoun, E., & Choueiri, L. (2010). The Syntax of Arabic (Cambridge Syntax Guides). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Aoun, J., Choueiri, L., & Hornstein, N. (2001). Resumption, movement, and derivational economy. Linguistic Inquiry, 32, 371–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ariel, M. (1999). Cognitive universals and linguistic conventions: The case of resumptive pronouns. Studies in Language, 23, 217–269.Google Scholar
Badecker, W. & Kuminiak, F. (2007). Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 65–85.Google Scholar
Bakir, M. (1979). Aspects of clause structure in Arabic. Doctoral dissertation. Indiana University, Bloomington.Google Scholar
Benmamoun, E. (2000). The Feature Structure of Functional Categories: A Comparative Study of Arabic Dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Benmamoun, E. (2008). Clause structure and the syntax of verbless sentences. In Freidin, R., Otero, C. P., & Zubizarreta, M. L., eds., Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 105–131.Google Scholar
Bock, K. & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Borer, H. (1984). Restrictive relatives in modern Hebrew. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2, 219–260.Google Scholar
Borer, H. (1999). Deconstructing the construct. In Johnson, K. & Roberts, I. G., eds., Beyond Principles and Parameters. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 43–89.Google Scholar
Borer, H. & Grodzinsky, Y. (1986). Syntactic cliticization and lexical cliticization: The case of Hebrew dative clitics. In Borer, H., ed., The Syntax of Pronominal Clitics (Syntax and Semantics, 19). New York: Academic Press, pp. 175–217.Google Scholar
Borg, A. (1986). The Maintenance of Maltese as a Language: What Chances? Strasbourg: Council of Europe.Google Scholar
Bornkessel, I., Schlesewsky, M., & Friederici, A. D. (2002). Beyond syntax: Language-related positivities reflect the revision of hierarchies. NeuroReport, 13, 361–364.Google Scholar
Camilleri, M., ElSadek, S., & Sadler, L. (2014). A cross dialectal view of the Arabic dative alternation. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 61, 3–44.Google Scholar
Choueiri, L. (2017). Resumption in varieties of Arabic. In Benmamoun, E. & Bassiouney, R., eds., The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 131–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cowart, W. (1997). Experimental Syntax: Applying Objective Methods to Sentence Judgments. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Danon, G. (2012). Nothing to agree on: Non-agreeing subjects of copular clauses in Hebrew. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 59, 85–108.Google Scholar
Danon, G. (2013a). Hebrew QNP agreement: Towards an empirically based analysis. Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, 15, 5–23.Google Scholar
Danon, G. (2013b). Agreement alternations with quantified nominals in Modern Hebrew. Journal of Linguistics, 49, 55–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deutsch, A. & Dank, M. (2011). Symmetric and asymmetric patterns of attraction errors in producing subject–predicate agreement in Hebrew: An issue of morphological structure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 24–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eilam, A. (2008). Intervention effects: Why Amharic patterns differently. In Abner, N. & Bishop, J., eds., Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, pp. 141–149.Google Scholar
El-Yasin, M. K. (1985). Basic word order in classical Arabic and Jordanian Arabic. Lingua, 65, 107–122.Google Scholar
Engdahl, E. (1997). Relative clause extractions in context. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax, 60, 51–79.Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, N. (1973). On the nature of island constraints. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, N. (1992). Resumptive pronouns in islands. In Goodluck, H. & Rochemont, M., eds., Island Constraints. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 89–108.Google Scholar
Fabri, R. & Borg, A. (2002). Topic, focus and word order in Maltese. In Abderrahim, Y., Benjelloun, F., Dahbi, M., & Iraqui-Sinaceur, Z., eds., Aspects of the Dialects of Arabic Today. Proceedings of the 4th Conference of the International Arabic Dialectology Association (AIDA). Rabat: Amapatril, pp. 354–363.Google Scholar
Fadlon, J., Keshev, M., & Meltzer-Asscher, A. (2018). A shift in gap manifestation incurs processing costs: Evidence from Hebrew. Poster presented at the 31st CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Davis, CA.Google Scholar
Fadlon, J., Sassoon, G. W., & Schumacher, P. B. (2018). Discrete dimension accessibility in multidimensional concepts. The Mental Lexicon, 13, 105–142.Google Scholar
Falk, Y. N. (2004). The Hebrew present-tense copula as a mixed category. In Proceedings of the Lexical Functional Grammar 04 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Farby, S., Danon, G., Walters, J., & Ben-Shachar, M. (2010). The acceptability of resumptive pronouns in Hebrew. In Falk, Y., ed., Proceedings of the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics 26. Jerusalem: IATL.Google Scholar
Fassi-Fehri, A. (1993). Issues in the Structure of Arabic Clauses and Word Order. London: Kluwer Academic.Google Scholar
Ferreira, F. (2005). Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science. The Linguistic Review, 22, 365–380.Google Scholar
Ford, D. (2009). The influence of word order on Modern Standard Arabic information structure. GIALens (Special Electronic Publication of the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics), 3(2). www.gial.eduGoogle Scholar
Gafter, R. J. (2014). The distribution of the Hebrew Possessive Dative construction: Guided by unaccusativity or prominence?. Linguistic Inquiry, 45, 482–500.Google Scholar
Gezmu, A. M., Seyoum, B. E., Gasser, M., & Nürnberger, A. (2018). Contemporary Amharic Corpus: Automatically morpho-syntactically tagged Amharic corpus. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Linguistic Resources for Natural Language Processing, 65–70.Google Scholar
Gibson, E., Piantadosi, S. T., & Fedorenko, E. (2013). Quantitative methods in syntax/semantics research: A response to Sprouse and Almeida (2013). Language and Cognitive Processes, 28, 229–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., & Frost, R. (2001). Two routes to grammatical gender: Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30, 627–651.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Y. (2008). Predication and equation in Hebrew (nonpseudocleft) copular sentences. Current Issues in Generative Hebrew Linguistics, 1, 161–196.Google Scholar
Hazout, I. (1990). Verbal nouns: Theta-theoretical studies in Hebrew and Arabic. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Heestand, D., Xiang, M., & Polinsky, M. (2011). Resumption still does not rescue islands. Linguistic Inquiry, 42, 138–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heller, D. (1999). The syntax and semantics of specificational pseudoclefts in Hebrew. MA thesis, Tel Aviv University.Google Scholar
Ibrahim, I. I. (2016). Gender assignment to lexical borrowings by heritage speakers of Arabic. Western Papers in Linguistics/Cahiers linguistiques de Western, 1, article 1.Google Scholar
Keshev, M. (2016). Active dependency formation in syntactic islands: Evidence from Hebrew sentence processing. MA thesis, Tel Aviv University.Google Scholar
Keshev, M. & Meltzer-Asscher, A. (2017). Active dependency formation in islands: How grammatical resumption affects sentence processing. Language, 93, 549–568.Google Scholar
Keshev, M. & Meltzer-Asscher, A. (2019). A processing-based account of subliminal wh-island effects. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 37, 621–657.Google Scholar
Khamis-Dakwar, R., Froud, K., & Gordon, P. (2012). Acquiring diglossia: Mutual influences of formal and colloquial Arabic on children’s grammaticality judgments. Journal of Child Language, 39, 61–89.Google Scholar
Kluender, R. (1998). On the distinction between strong and weak islands: A processing perspective. In Culicover, P. W. & McNally, L., eds., The Limits of Syntax (Syntax and Semantics, 29). San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 241–280.Google Scholar
Kramer, R. & Eilam, A. (2012). Verb-medial word orders in Amharic. Journal of Afroasiatic Languages, 5, 75–104.Google Scholar
Landau, I. (1999). Possessor raising and the structure of VP. Lingua, 107, 1–37.Google Scholar
Landau, I. (2010). The Locative Syntax of Experiencers (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph, 53). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lassadi, B. (2003). Optional wh-movement in French and Egyptian Arabic. Cahiers linguistiques d’Ottawa, 31, 67–93.Google Scholar
Linzen, T. & Oseki, Y. (2018). The reliability of acceptability judgments across languages. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1), 100. DOI:10.5334/gjgl.528Google Scholar
Malkawi, N. & Guilliot, N. (2007). Reconstruction & Islandhood in Jordanian Arabic. In Mughazy, M. A., ed., Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, vol. XX. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 87–104.Google Scholar
McCloskey, J. (2017). Resumption. In Everaert, M. & Van Riemsdijk, H. C., eds.,The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1–30.Google Scholar
Meltzer-Asscher, A. (2021). Resumptive pronouns in language comprehension and production. Annual Review of Linguistics, 7, 1.1–1.18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meltzer-Asscher, A., Fadlon, J., Goldstein, K., & Holan, A. (2015). Direct object resumption in Hebrew: How modality of presentation and relative clause position affect acceptability. Lingua, 166, 65–79.Google Scholar
Meltzer-Asscher, A. & Siloni, T. (2013). Unaccusative. In The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Mohammad, M. (1988). On the parallelism between IP and DP. In Borer, H., ed., Proceedings of the 7th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 7). Stanford, CA: CSLI, pp. 241–254.Google Scholar
Ouhalla, J. (1991). Functional Categories and Parametric Variation. New York:Routledge.Google Scholar
Overfelt, J. D. (2009). The syntax of relative clause constructions in Tigrinya. Doctoral dissertation, Purdue University.Google Scholar
Perlmutter, D. M. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. In Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 157–190.Google Scholar
Phillips, C. (2010). Should we impeach armchair linguists? Japanese/Korean Linguistics, 17, 49–64.Google Scholar
Phillips, C. (2013). On the nature of island constraints. I: Language processing and reductionist accounts. In Sprouse, J. & Hornstein, N., eds., Experimental Syntax and Island Effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–108.Google Scholar
Phillips, C. & Wagers, M. (2007). Relating structure and time in linguistics and psycholinguistics. In Gaskel, M. G., ed., Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 739–756.Google Scholar
Preminger, O. (2010). Nested interrogatives and the locus of wh. In Phoevos Panagiotidis, E., ed., The Complementizer Phase: Subjects and Operators. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 200–235.Google Scholar
Prunet, J. F. (2006). External evidence and the Semitic root. Morphology, 16, 41–67.Google Scholar
Reinhart, T. (1981). A second COMP position. In Belletti, A., Brandi, L., & Rizzi, L., eds., Theory of Markedness in Generative Grammar. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, pp. 517–557.Google Scholar
Ritter, E. (1991). Two functional categories in noun phrases. Rothstein, S., ed., Perspectives on Phrase Structure (Syntax and Semantics, 25). New York: Academic Press, pp. 37–62.Google Scholar
Ross, J. R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Rychlý, P. & Suchomel, V. (2016). Annotated Amharic Corpora. In Sojka, P., Horak, A., Kopachek, I., & Pala, K., eds., Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Text, Speech, and Dialogue. New York: Springer, pp. 295–302.Google Scholar
Ryding, K. C. (2011). Arabic datives, ditransitives, and the preposition li. In Orfali, B., ed., The Shadow of Arabic: The Centrality of Language to Arabic Culture. Leiden: Brill, pp. 283–299.Google Scholar
Schütze, C. (2016). The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. Berlin: Language Science Press.Google Scholar
Sells, P. (1984). Syntax and semantics of resumptive pronouns. Linguistic Review, 4, 261–267.Google Scholar
Shlonsky, U. (1992). Resumptive pronouns as a last resort. Linguistic Inquiry, 23, 443–468.Google Scholar
Shlonsky, U. (1997). Clause Structure and Word Order in Hebrew and Arabic: An Essay in Comparative Semitic Syntax. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shlonsky, U. (2004). The form of Semitic noun phrases. Lingua, 114, 1465–1526.Google Scholar
Shlonsky, U. & Ouhalla, J. (2002). Themes in Arabic and Hebrew Syntax. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Sichel, I. (2014). Resumptive pronouns and competition. Linguistic Inquiry, 45, 655–693.Google Scholar
Siloni, T. (2001). Construct states at the PF interface. Linguistic Variation Yearbook, 1, 229–266.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J. (2007). Continuous Acceptability, categorical grammaticality, and experimental syntax. Biolinguistics, 1, 118–129.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J., Caponigro, I., Greco, C., & Cecchetto, C. (2016). Experimental syntax and the variation of island effects in English and Italian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 34, 307–444.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J., Fukuda, S., Ono, H., & Kluender, R. (2011). Reverse island effects and the backward search for a licensor in multiple wh-questions. Syntax, 14, 179–203.Google Scholar
Sprouse, J., Schütze, C., & Almeida, D. (2013). A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001–2010. Lingua, 134, 219–248.Google Scholar
Stowe, L. (1986). Parsing wh-constructions: Evidence for on-line gap location. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1, 227–245.Google Scholar
Tucker, M., Idrissi, A., & Almeida, D. (2015). Representing number in the real-time processing of agreement: self-paced reading evidence from Arabic. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 347.Google Scholar
Tucker, M., Idrissi, A., Sprouse, J., & Almeida, D. (2019). Resumption ameliorates different islands differentially: Acceptability data from Modern Standard Arabic. In Khalfaoui, A. & Tucker, M., eds., Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, 30: Papers from the Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics, Stony Brook, New York, 2016, and Norman, Oklahoma, 2017. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 159–193.Google Scholar
Vella, A. (2013). Languages and language varieties in Malta. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16, 532–552.Google Scholar
Wagers, M. W., Lau, E. F., & Phillips, C. (2009). Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes. Journal of Memory and Language, 61(2), 206–237.Google Scholar
Wahba, W. A. (1992). LF movement in Iraqi Arabic. In Huang, J. & May, R., eds., Logical Structure and Linguistic Structure. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 253–276.Google Scholar
Wasow, T. & Arnold, J. (2005). Intuitions in linguistic argumentation. Lingua, 115, 1481–1496.Google Scholar
Wilmsen, D. (2010). Dialects of written Arabic: Syntactic differences in the treatment of object pronouns in Egyptian and Levantine newspapers. Arabica, 57, 99–128.Google Scholar
Wilmsen, D. (2012). The ditransitive dative divide in Arabic: Grammaticality assessments and actuality. In Bassiouney, R. & Katz, E. G., eds., Arabic Language and Linguistics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 215–232.Google Scholar
Yoshida, M., Kazanina, N., Pablos, L., & Sturt, P. (2014). On the origin of islands. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29, 761–770.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×