1 Control and Raising: Gone with(out) A traceTori Larsen and Christer Johansson University of Bergen Experimental Psycholinguistics Conference Menorca, June 2017

2 Control: Jeani is reluctant PROi to leave.Null determiner phrase (PRO) No movement outside of origin clause Motivation: Theta criterion (Chomsky, 1981) Extended Projection Principle (EPP): “All clauses have subjects” (Chomsky, 1981; Rothstein, 1983) Baltin 1995 PRO is in the VP

3 Subtypes of Control Subject Control Object ControlApekatten lover elefanten å bade i sjøen snart. “The monkey promises the elephant to bathe in the sea soon.” Elefanten tillater sjiraffen å plukke blomster i hagen. “The elephant allows the giraffe to pick flowers in the garden.”

4 Raising: Jeank is likely to tk leave. Null NP trace (t)Movement outside of origin clause Motivation: Extended Projection Principle (EPP): “All clauses have subjects” Case Filter (Chomsky, 1981) Introduce Hornstein’s idea of Movement theory of control  not on slide

5 Subtypes of Raising Subject-to-subject RaisingSubject-to-object Raising Alligatoren synes å fange fisk til frokost hverdag. “The alligator seems to catch fish for breakfast everyday.” Bananen antar apekatten å være god til middag. “The banana, assumes the monkey to be good for dinner.”

6 Empirical evidence of the syntactic processing of control and raisingFocusing on Norwegian What is the status of PRO? Can empirical data support the existence of PRO? Can we find reactivation effects for PRO? If so, at what point in the sentence does PRO exhibit reactivation effects? Are control and raising processed in a different manner? Are PRO and NP traces different syntactic items (cf. Hornstein, 1999)? Do PRO and NP traces show reactivation effects in the same position?

7 What observations would we expect?Trace Reactivation Hypothesis Reference-dependent items cause reactivation of their antecedent noun phrases (Nicol and Swinney, 1989) Reactivation effects in relation to priming When an image is co-referent with PRO or a trace, its presentation facilitates a faster participant response.

8 Experimental HypothesesPilot study Null hypothesis: The antecedent of PRO does not reactivate in a control sentence. Alternative hypothesis: The antecedent of PRO reactivates before/after the infinitive maker in a control sentence. Main experiment Null hypothesis: The position of antecedent/referent reactivation is the same in both raising and control sentence structures, before the infinitive maker. Alternative hypothesis: The position of antecedent/referent reactivation differs between raising and control structures.

9 Background InformationPRO was originally introduced to fill a gap in Generative Grammar theory See theta criterion (Chomsky, 1981) PRO created a violation in the Case filter and did not fit with Binding Theory The PRO theorem attempts to solve the problem (Chomsky and Lasnik, 1993) PRO cannot be governed, therefore excluded from Binding Theory PRO has null case, satisfies the Case filter The PRO theorem is controversial for languages like Icelandic (Sigurðsson, 1991) PRO may carry case other than null, as shown by syntactic agreement

10 Previous Experimental WorkOsterhout and Nicol (1988) Cross-modal reaction time experiments Used both active and passive English control sentences Found that both possible antecedents show reactivation at the PRO position Similar to pronoun trace reactivation patterns PRO is delayed in comparison Most Recent Filler Strategy does not apply for empty categories

11 Previous Experimental WorkWalenski (2002) Cross-modal reaction time and event-related potential (ERP) data Found priming effects only for raising constructions Found differences in processing speed Raising trace reactivates before the infinitive marker PRO reactivation is delayed or does not exist Results found for control processing were inconclusive but indicates that control and raising are different

12 Pilot Study To analyze reactivation patterns at specific test positions in control sentences Reaction time experiment and priming paradigm Control test sentences and non-control filler sentences Two test sentence constructions Subject and Object Control Three test positions Before/after the infinitive marker and at the end of the sentence 144 test sentence presentations 20 native Norwegian speakers

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14 Pilot Study Results Mean RT Effect of Position on Sentence Type Found a weak effect of position for subject control constructions after the infinitive marker Passive constructions affect the processing of control *** The plot includes only syntactic priming and excludes passives 5 minutes per graph

15 Main Experiment To analyze reactivation patterns at specific test positions in control and raising sentences Reaction time experiment and priming paradigm Control and raising sentences Five test sentence constructions Object Control, Subject (1/2) Control, Subject-to-subject Raising, Subject-to-object Raising Two test positions Before/after the infinitive marker 80 test sentence presentations 62 native Norwegian speakers Comprehension questions Say procedure was the same but with comprehension questions

16 Sjiraffen tilbyr alligatoren å ta ansvar for sine feil.*Decision: Yes or No Answer: Yes Priming type: Syntactic, correct PRO referent *Decision: Yes or No Answer: Yes Priming type: Non-syntactic, incorrect PRO referent

17 Main Experiment ResultsEffect of Position on Condition, Syntactic Priming with a Non-syntactic Baseline Control constructions display priming after the infinitive marker If reactivation occurs then it is in this position Raising constructions tend to priming effects before the infinitive marker Immediate NP trace reactivation Primed images showed a speed up in reaction time when congruent with the referent of PRO e o RT Priming Explain non-syntactic baseline and speed up in comparison, that you would not expect speed up always for subject (furthest away item) because of linear distance, explain why it is control, say you tried to find effects in other areas as well but this showed the clearest results

18 Conclusion Control and raising show differences in processingEmpirical evidence for the existence of PRO Evidence of complex constraint interaction Control is more than just a syntactic phenomenon Further experimental work is required

19 Towards a Unified Theory of ControlIs PRO really a determiner phrase? Ghost in the syntactic tree structure PRO possibly starts as a copy of the matrix clause and is overwritten Copy of clause triggered by the infinitive marker? Theory inspired by experimental data Consistent with results Still new and in need of testing and refining Supports a procedural account of language processing

20 Future Research Experimental work using various testing techniquesNeuroimaging, EEG, eye-tracking The processing of control across languages Universal grammar? Second language learners Is control a learned phenomenon? Languages that do not use infinitive markers in control constructions

21 References Baayen, R.H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Foris, Dordrecht. Chomsky, N. and H. Lasnik (1993). The theory of principles and parameters. Syntax: An international handbook of contemporary research 1, 505–569. Hornstein, N.(1999). Movement and control. Linguistic inquiry 30 (1), 69–96. Nicol, J. and D. Swinney (1989). The role of structure in coreference assignment during sentence comprehension. Journal of psycholinguistic research 18 (1),5–19. Osterhout, L. and J. Nicol (1988). The time-course of antecedent activation following empty subjects. Unpublished manuscript. Rothstein, S. D. (1983). The syntactic forms of predication. Ph. D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sigurðsson, H.Á. (2008). The case of PRO. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 26 (2), 403–450.

22 Acknowledgments Financial support from the Norwegian Research Council project CATO #213534 Support from the University of Bergen Department of Linguistics, Literary and Aesthetic Studies