Paper

Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees

Authors: 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). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/nz4q-6b09