Abstract
In a pioneer paper, Featherston (Featherston, Sam. 2007. Data in generative grammar: The stick and the carrot. Theoretical Linguistics 33. 269–318) advocated the use of better controlled data in theoretical linguistics. Despite diverging on many aspects, most syntactic theories are now testing their hypotheses with more data than a few linguists’ intuitions. I will examine the consequences of this empirical turn on two syntactic phenomena: long-distance dependencies (LDD) and ellipsis. In a series of recent experiments (Liu, Yingtong, Elodie Winckel, Anne Abeillé, Barbara Hemforth & Edward Gibson. 2022. Structural, functional and processing perspectives on linguistic islands effects. Annual Review of Linguistics 8. 495–525), most of the syntactic constraints (‘island constraints’) on LDD have shown less crosslinguistic variation and more cross-construction variation than previously thought. Corpus and experimental data have also shown elliptical clauses to be more flexible than expected under deletion-under-identity theories (Poppels, Till. 2022. Explaining ellipsis without identity. The Linguistic Review 39. 341–400). These are challenges for most syntactic theories, which call for taking discourse factors more seriously into account.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- The empirical turn and its consequences for theoretical syntax
- Linguistic typology in action: how to know more
- Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics
- On the goals of theoretical linguistics
- Social meaning
- Large Language Models and theoretical linguistics
- It’s time for a complete theory of partial predictability in language
- Theoretical Linguistics and the philosophy of linguistics
- Speech and sign: the whole human language
- Cross-linguistic insights in the theory of semantics and its interface with syntax
- Reflections on the grammatical view of scalar implicatures
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- The empirical turn and its consequences for theoretical syntax
- Linguistic typology in action: how to know more
- Large language models are better than theoretical linguists at theoretical linguistics
- On the goals of theoretical linguistics
- Social meaning
- Large Language Models and theoretical linguistics
- It’s time for a complete theory of partial predictability in language
- Theoretical Linguistics and the philosophy of linguistics
- Speech and sign: the whole human language
- Cross-linguistic insights in the theory of semantics and its interface with syntax
- Reflections on the grammatical view of scalar implicatures