LangSci Lunch Talk: Nick Huang (LING)

Food and ideas bring people together.  Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

Lunch is served starting at 12:15pm.

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A “missing NP illusion” in Mandarin Chinese doubly center-embedded sentences

A doubly center-embedded (DCE) sentence in English with a missing verb phrase, e.g. 'The dog the rat the cat chased ran away,' is judged to be relatively acceptable despite being ungrammatical. In this talk, I discuss a novel related illusion for Mandarin Chinese DCE sentences missing a noun phrase, and how it differs from its English counterpart. To account for the illusory properties of DCE sentences in both languages, it is proposed that argument-predicate pairings are built in a more bottom-up fashion. As a result, the parser prematurely completes a noun-verb link in both languages, with different representational consequences. I contrast this account with an alternative account in which earlier predictions are “forgotten” (Gibson & Thomas 1999), showing that the data is inconsistent with the alternative account.