Description:

The mental status of derivational operations

In this talk I present an approach to integrating generative syntax with information-theoretic sentence complexity metrics, from which it follows that two grammars that are extensionally equivalent --- two grammars which produce the same structures, and differ only in what primitive derivational operations they use to build those structures --- can nonetheless give rise to distinct predictions concerning sentence comprehension difficulty. This provides a linking hypothesis that connects sentence processing observations to subtle questions about the derivational operations that comprise human grammars (merge, move, re-merge, agree, etc.). Competing answers to these sorts of fine-grained questions can therefore be understood as competing claims about cognitive machinery even if they fail to make distinct predictions about acceptability judgement data.