Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees
- Charles J Torres (University of California, Irvine)
- Kenneth Hanson (Stony Brook University)
- Thomas Graf (Stony Brook University)
- Connor Mayer (University of California, Irvine)
Abstract
We fuse two recent strands of work in subregular linguistics—probabilistic tier projections (Mayer, 2021) and tier-based perspectives on movement (Graf, 2022a)—into a probabilistic model of syntax that makes it easy to add gradience to traditional, categorical analyses from the syntactic literature. As a case study, we test this model on experimental data from Sprouse et al. (2016) for a number of island effects in English. We show that the model correctly replicates the superadditive effects and gradience that have been observed in the psycholinguistic literature.
Keywords: formal language theory, gradience, island effects, tiers
How to Cite:
Torres, C. J., Hanson, K., Graf, T. & Mayer, C., (2023) “Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 6(1), 155-164. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/nz4q-6b09
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