Although German, as a grammatical gender language, requires noun–pronoun agreement in anaphora, exceptions to the rule occur, e.g., in possessive constructions when the gender-incongruent possessive pronoun sein (masculine/neuter, his/its) refers to feminine antecedents instead of congruent ihr (feminine, her). While this violation is merely grammatical for inanimate referents, it can provoke semantic mismatches for human possessors (especially gender-specific female nouns like die Hexei – seini (the witch – his/its), but less so with gender-indifferent human nouns, such as die Kontaktperson (the contact person). A self-paced reading (SPR) experiment tested the acceptability and processing of sentences in which incongruent sein referred to feminine possessors, which differed in animacy status (inanimate versus human). Introducing this agreement violation reduced acceptability and elevated reading and reaction times (RTs), but effects varied by antecedent animacy. These results suggest an animacy restriction in possessive reference and substantiate the impact of meaning-based gender cues on pronominalization.

A perennial problem for sociolinguists interested in morphosyntactic variation is that such forms are often low frequency, making quantitative analysis difficult or impossible. However, sociolinguists have been generally reluctant to adopt methodologies from syntax, such as acceptability data gleaned from speaker intuition, due to the belief that these judgments are not necessarily reliable. In this article we present data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, which employs sociolinguistic methodologies in spoken data alongside the results of acceptability judgments. We target three morphosyntactic variables and compare and contrast these across the two data types in order to assess the reliability of the judgment data at community level. The results show that reliability is variable-dependent. For some variables, there is clear correlation; with others, it appears that, as Labov (1996) phrased it, ‘intuitions fail’. We discuss how factors such as salience, social stigma and local identity combine to govern the reliability of judgment data.

Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in the actor/actress class, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in the prince/princess class, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

Finite adjunct clauses are often assumed to be among the strongest islands for filler–gap dependency creation cross-linguistically, but Kush, Lohndal & Sprouse (2019) found experimental evidence suggesting that finite conditional om-adjunct clauses are not islands for topicalization in Norwegian. To investigate the generality of these findings, we ran three acceptability judgment experiments testing topicalization out of three adjunct clause types: om ‘if’, når ‘when’ and fordi ‘because’ in Norwegian. Largely replicating Kush et al. (2019), we find evidence for the absence of strong island effects with topicalization from om-adjuncts in all three experiments. We find island effects for når- and fordi-adjuncts, but the size of the effects and the underlying judgment distributions that produce those effects differ greatly by island type. Our results suggest that the syntactic category ‘adjunct’ may not constitute a suitably fine-grained grouping to explain variation in island effects.

This article examines the performance of heritage speakers (HSs) on two types of acceptability judgment tasks (AJTs) as well as their corresponding confidence ratings. Data were collected from 75 native speakers of Spanish who were subsequently divided into three groups: Spanish monolinguals, Spanish-dominant HSs, and English-dominant HSs. An AJT targeting morphosyntax (Task 1) showed that all groups were affected by task stimulus, that is, they were significantly less accurate on the ungrammatical items. A lexically focused AJT (Task 2) revealed the tendency of HSs to accept complex words that are possible yet not attested. Confidence ratings on both tasks were very high overall, and there was a significant relationship between accuracy and confidence. Thus, the data question the assumption made in a number of previous studies that HSs suffer from a lack of certainty in their linguistic intuitions. Finally, between-group effects show that the Spanish-dominant HS group was not different from the monolingual group on Task 1, yet there were significant differences between all three groups on Task 2. By comparing morphosyntactic and lexical phenomena on two tasks administered in the same modality, this research contributes to the discussion of vulnerable domains in heritage language bilingualism.

On the basis of data from Swedish, this paper examines the Small Clause Hypothesis (Kush & Lindahl 2011, Kush, Omaki & Hornstein 2013) proposed to account for relative clause (RC) extractions in Mainland Scandinavian. The hypothesis predicts that extraction possibilities differ for relative clauses in the complement of verbs which select and verbs which do not select a small clause (SC), and that the possibility of RC extraction hinges on the ability of the matrix verb to select SCs involving the predicational operator som. I report results from an acceptability judgment experiment on RC extraction in Swedish manipulating three conditions: (a) SC-selecting verbs compatible with som, (b) SC-selecting verbs incompatible with som, and (c) verbs that are incompatible with SCs. The results show no significant difference between these conditions, thus offer no support in favor of the Small Clause Hypothesis. Additional problems are posed by the possibility of extraction from object RCs and by extraction possibilities in the absence of som.

Linguistic acceptability judgments are widely agreed to reflect constraints on real-time language processing. Nonetheless, very little is known about how processing costs affect acceptability judgments. In this paper, we explore how processing limitations are manifested in acceptability judgment data. In a series of experiments, we consider how two factors relate to judgments for sentences with varying degrees of complexity: (1) the way constraints combine (i.e., additively or super-additively), and (2) the way a comprehender’s memory resources influence acceptability judgments. Results indicate that multiple sources of processing difficulty can combine to produce super-additive effects, and that there is a positive linear relationship between reading span scores and judgments for sentences whose unacceptability is attributable to processing costs. These patterns do not hold for sentences whose unacceptability is attributable to factors other than processing costs, e.g., grammatical constraints. We conclude that tests of (super)-additivity and of relationships to reading span scores can help to identify the effects of processing difficulty on acceptability judgments, although these tests cannot be used in contexts of extreme processing difficulty.