Syntactic freezing has mainly been approached from a structural point of view, recently though, more cognitive approaches in terms of processing costs have been proposed. One such processing account is the additive account. According to this approach, the freezing effect is best explained as an additive effect of two syntactic processes coming together, rather than being a phenomenon on its own. Another processing account argues that the freezing effect is the result of a prosodic garden path according to which extraction can only take place from a prosodically focused constituent. The current study provides empirical evidence for a less discussed factor contributing to the freezing effect, namely a pragmatic one. The pragmatic account requires frozen sentences to have contextually given referents. If no such referent is present, the sentence becomes less acceptable. The need for such a referent comes from the non-default word order associated with frozen sentences, which often highlights/focuses a certain constituent. Several experiments were run to test the pragmatic account. Based on the results it was concluded that pragmatic factors play a significant role in explaining the apparent freezing effects. Other factors however, seem to contribute to this effect as well since this effect cannot be fully explained in terms of pragmatic factors solely.
Freezing is a syntactic phenomenon according to which a constituent that has been moved from its base-generated position becomes a barrier for extraction, meaning that no material inside the ‘frozen’ constituent can be extracted out of it (
An illustration of this phenomenon is provided in Example (1). Whenever a DP is in its base-generated position (1a), extraction of a wh-phrase out of this DP is considered grammatical (1b): The wh-phrase
(1) | ( |
|
a. | I think that John never reads [reviews of his books] | |
b. | Whose books |
|
c. | I think that [reviews of his books] |
|
d. | *Whose books |
The idea that there are certain syntactic domains that prevent extraction of syntactic material (i.e. syntactic islands), has been discussed ever since the early days of generative grammar (
The idea that syntax is solely responsible for the freezing effect, has long been the standard assumption. More recently though, other factors involving processing difficulties have been argued to play an important role in explaining the freezing effect as well (
So far, there is no consensus on how freezing should be characterized and which factors play a role. As already pointed out by Culicover & Winkler (
Ross (
(2) | ( |
|
a. | A girl t |
|
b. | *[The coat [which |
To account for the ill-formedness of Example (2b), Ross (
(3) | |
“If a clause has been extraposed from a noun phrase whose head noun is lexical, this noun phrase may not be moved, nor may any element of the clause be moved out of that clause.” |
In a later paper, Ross incorporated the FSC under a more general island constraint: The Immediate Self Domination Principle (ISF). According to this principle, no element may be chopped out of a node which immediately dominates another node of the same type (
(4) | [ |
Building on Ross (
Example (5a) illustrates a ditransitive sentence. For this sentence the base phrase structure rule is VP > V NP PP. Since no syntactic transformation has applied to the PP it is not frozen and therefore extraction of a wh-word is possible as is illustrated by the acceptability of (5b). In Example (5c) on the other hand, heavy NP shift has taken place, in other words a syntactic transformation has applied to sentence (5a) which moves the NP to a position following the PP. The sentence created after transformation is no longer structure-preserving (i.e. cannot be derived from the base generated phrase structure rules which would be VP > V DP PP) and therefore any element within this non-structure-preserving node is frozen. For this very reason one cannot extract a wh-phrase out of the PP as is illustrated in (5d).
(5) | ( |
|
a. | John gave [the picture that was hanging on the wall] [to Bill]. | |
b. | Who |
|
c. | John gave [to Bill] [the picture that was hanging on the wall]. | |
d. | *Who |
Another structural account by Müller (
(6) | ||
a. | Movement must not cross a barrier | |
b. |
It should become clearer from Example (7) how the CED would account for frozen sentences. In (7a), extraction of the wh-word is possible as the verb
(7)
a.
Was
what
hat
has
Otto
Otto
[
immer
always
[t
t
für
for
Romane]
novels
gelesen]?
read
‘What kind of novels has Otto always read?’
b.
*Was
what
hat
has
Otto
Otto
[
[t
t
für
for
Romane]
novels
immer
always
t
t
gelesen]?
read
‘What kind of novels has Otto always read?’
So far, Müller’s CED seems to be yet another way of describing the freezing phenomenon and it would therefore not differ from any other structural analyses like Ross’s freezing principle or Wexler-Culicover’s freezing principle. What sets Müller’s CED account apart from the other accounts is the prediction it makes with regard to “repairing” a frozen sentence. According to this account a frozen sentence can be repaired by scrambling something over it, which makes the frozen constituent no longer a barrier for further movement. This is called
According to Müller,
(8)
a.
*Was1
what
haben
have
[
t1
t1
für
for
Bücher]
books.
[
den
the.
Fritz]
Fritz
beeindruckt?
impressed
‘What kind of books impressed Fritz?’
b.
Was1
what
haben
have
[
den
the.
Fritz]
Fritz
[
t1
t1
für
for
Bücher]
books.
beeindruckt?
impressed
‘What kind of books impressed Fritz?’
As will become clear in the next section, rather than adopting a syntactic account for melting like Müller (
So far, we have seen different accounts that try to capture the freezing phenomenon in terms of syntactic principles. The only thing that all structural accounts seem to agree on is that sentences involving wh-extraction from a moved constituent, i.e. so called frozen sentences, are less acceptable than sentences involving wh-extraction from a based-generated constituent. The current study makes an attempt at figuring out what causes this lower acceptability of frozen sentences.
More recently, attempts have been made to account for freezing effects in terms of a constraint on language processing rather than a constraint on syntax as we will see in the following sections.
Several studies in favor of a processing account have argued that that freezing effects are the result of two syntactic processes occurring simultaneously, namely movement and extraction (
Hofmeister et al. (
(9) | a. | Kenneth revealed which president he overheard a nasty remark about earlier. |
(+ |
||
b. | Kenneth revealed which President he overheard a nasty remark earlier about. | |
(+ |
||
c. | Kenneth revealed that he overheard a nasty remark about the President earlier. | |
(– |
||
d. | Kenneth revealed that he overheard a nasty remark earlier about the President. | |
(– |
The results in
Acceptability scores of frozen sentences containing extraposed PPs.
Based on these results the conclusion was drawn that the effect of each variable on the acceptability judgments is sufficient to account for the net unacceptability of freezing sentences. If freezing was truly a phenomenon on its own, one would have expected an interaction effect between the two variables: This would indicate that one cannot simply add up the effects of extraction and extraposition to explain the freezing effect. Since no significant interaction effect was found, it was concluded that freezing is an additive effect of movement and extraction.
Based on the fact that previous studies have linked both these displacement phenomena (i.e. extraction and extraposition) to increased processing costs, Hofmeister et al. (
Similar results were found by Konietzko et al. (
In line with the previous studies, the current research sets out to test the additivity hypothesis for yet another case of freezing, namely sentences involving DP-fronting (see Example (10). Experiment 1.1 tests the additivity hypothesis to see whether the freezing effect is best described as a phenomenon on its own or as the additive result of two separate processes coming together.
(10) | [Which students] |
The additivity account would predict a main effect of wh-extraction and
It should be noted that the additivity account itself does not directly provide evidence for a processing account or a structural account. Rather it tells us whether the freezing effect is a phenomenon on its own or whether it is the result of two syntactic processes happening simultaneously. The additivity account itself does not tell us what factors (be it structural, processing or yet another factor) would best explain the results.
A different approach is taken by Culicover & Winkler (
(11) | Kenneth revealed [which President] |
The garden path is created by a potential gap immediately following the verb
On the other hand, there are freezing cases where the ill-formedness is due to a prosodic garden path rather than a chain garden path. The main idea here is that the lower acceptability of freezing sentences is due to a mismatch between the default intonation pattern and its syntactic form. In this case the freezing examples violate a prosodic constraint which states that extraction can only take place from a focused constituent (
(12) | |
“When parsing decontextualized linguistic examples, the processor projects the default prosodic pattern of the particular language and construction onto the target sentence. In freezing configurations, the default intonational pattern leads to a prosodic garden path defined as a prosody-information structure conflict. Reanalysis triggers the search for a context-dependent non-default prosodic pattern.” |
(13) | |
“Freezing effects which result from extraction out of non-canonical constructions can be repaired by discourse appropriate non-default prosody.” |
Let us look at an example to get a better idea of the PGH and ISH. We will take example (14) from the previous section to show how the same example can be explained in terms of a prosodic constraint rather than a syntactic constraint. Remember from the previous section that according to Müller (
(14)
a.
*Was1
what
haben
have
[
t1
t1
für
for
Bücher]
books.
[
den
the.
Fritz]
Fritz
beeindruckt?
impressed
‘what kind of books impressed Fritz’
b.
Was1
what
haben
have
[
den
the.
Fritz]
Fritz
[
t1
t1
für
for
Bücher]
books.
t2
t2
beeindruckt?
impressed
‘What kind of books impressed Fritz?’
(15)
a.
Was
haben
[
den
Fritz]
L
[
t1
für
B
H*L
t2
beeindruckt
?
H%
‘What kind of
b.
*Was
haben
[
t1
für
Bücher]
L
[
den
F
H*L
beeindruckt
?
H%
‘What kind of books have impressed F
Applying a default intonation pattern to sentence (14a) results in the sentence accent being assigned to the discourse given DP
There are two conflicting information structural mismatches that occur during the parsing of (15b). First of all, it is argued that the
Second, the processor projects a nuclear pitch accent onto the DP
To resolve this prosodic garden path one has to change the intonation pattern such that the correct elements receive the correct accents. For Example (15b) that would mean assigning an non-default intonation pattern in which
(16)
a.
Was
haben
[
t1
für
B
H*L
[
den.
Fritz]
L
beeindruckt
?
H%
‘Which
By means of a prosodic constraint, Culicover & Winkler (
Winkler et al. (2016) put the prosodic account to the test. They took a
In line with Culicover & Winkler (
Their stimuli consisted of target sentences either preceded by a context invoking a default focus (17) or a context with contrastive focus on the subject (18). The discourse particle
(17)
(default focus)
Sag mal:
‘Tell me:’
a.
Was
what
haben
have
den
für
for
Ärzte
doctors.
den
den
the.
M
minister
kritisiert?
criticized?
‘What kind of doctors criticized the
(18)
(contrastive focus on subject)
Dass den Minister Journalisten kritisiert haben, weiß ich schon, aber
‘I already know that journalists criticized the minister, but’
a.
Was
what
haben
have
den
für
for
Ä
doctors.
den
den
the.
Minister
minister
kritisiert?
criticized?
‘What kind of
Their results confirm that a contrastive context significantly improves a frozen sentence, at least for German
In this section, we will explore how the freezing effect can be explained in terms of pragmatic requirements.
Birner & Ward (
This requirement will play an important role in the experiments reported in this article. As already suggested by Culicover & Winkler (
DP-fronting is often associated with topicalization. In English two types of topicalization are distinguished in general:
(19) | ( |
|
a. | Who did he call? | |
b. | J |
In topic topicalization, the main pitch accent is placed on the focused element which carries new information and does not correspond to the topicalized element of the sentence (
(20) | ( |
|
a. | What about John? | |
b. | John, he |
In topicalization constructions, the preposed element provides an anaphoric link to the preceding discourse (
A lot of confusion arises when dealing with topic and focus as already became clear from the different terminology used by different authors for the same phenomenon. The topic-focus distinction has been widely associated with the division between given and new information in a sentence. There has been disagreement and confusion, however, with regard to the exact nature of this association. According to Gundel (
Referential givenness-newness involves a relation between a linguistic expression and a corresponding non-linguistic entity in the speaker/hearer’s mind, the discourse (model), or some real or possible world, depending on where the referents or corresponding meanings of these linguistic expressions are assumed to reside. We will see that all the stimuli in the first sub-experiment (1.1) are referentially new whereas in sub-experiment (1.2) they are referentially given in the sense that the fronted DPs have been previously mentioned in the context.
Relational givenness-newness, by contrast, involves a partition of the semantic/conceptual representation of a sentence into two complementary parts, X and Y, where X is what the sentence is about (the logical/psychological subject) and Y is what is predicated about X (the logical/psychological predicate). Relational givenness can be associated with topic/focus. Topics are relationally given, by definition, in the sense that they are what the sentence/utterance is about.
That does not mean that a certain constituent cannot be both a topic and receive focus as claimed by Rizzi (
In the current research we will see that referential givenness plays a more important role in assessing freezing cases than prosodic/contrastive focus does (as would be predicted by the prosodic constraint analysis).
According to Rooth (
The S-topic is very similar to Focus in a way that they both induce alternatives. These alternatives though, do not have any impact on the Focus value, instead, it is a set containing different Focus values (Topic Value), i.e. a set of sets of propositions. Regardless of whether DP-fronting functions as topic or focus, or even both, the fact that both topic and focus invoke alternatives could potentially explain why sentences with preposed DPs would become more acceptable when such an alternative is already present in the preceding context.
The goal of the current study is not to determine whether the fronted DP is topic or focus nor is it to choose one freezing account over another one, rather it proposes a previously not considered factor that contributes to the freezing effect. Pragmatic factors do not rule out a processing or structural explanation of freezing. In fact, the freezing effect is most likely the result of various factors. Crucially though, it will be shown that pragmatic factors play an important role in explaining the freezing effect.
All stimuli in this study consist of so called D(iscourse)-linked wh-words. These are wh-words like
(21) | ( |
|
a. | *Who |
|
b. | ?[Which man] |
The operation moving the D-linked wh-word
In addition, as the name already suggests, these D-linked elements are somehow associated with the discourse. A wh-question like in (22b) needs some discourse referent and cannot be used out of the blue, like the question in (22a). This discourse linkage seems to be somewhat similar to the way a topic is said to associate with a discourse. Similarly then the expectation is that when an appropriate discourse is provided, sentences containing a D-linked wh-word would improve compared to when no such discourse is provided.
(22) | ( |
|
John bought something expensive yesterday. | ||
a. | What did he buy? | |
b. | #Which car did he buy? |
In this section I will recapitulate what has been discussed in the previous literature, highlight what is of interest for the current study and make predictions about the expected results.
As becomes clear from the previous literature, sentences involving wh-extraction from a moved constituent, i.e. frozen sentences, are less acceptable than sentences involving either wh-extraction or movement. In addition, there is evidence that the individual lowering effects of extraction and movement can be added up to account for the freezing effect. In terms of statistics that would mean that a significant main effect of wh-extraction and DP-fronting is to be expected, but no interaction effect.
In the previous section it has also been observed that some cases of freezing are not completely unacceptable and can be improved: Think of Müller (
A pragmatic account on the other hand, only requires a referential anchor in the previous context to which the moved constituent can refer. That means that regardless of whether or not that moved constituent is prosodically focused, as long as there is a contextual anchor present, the sentence should be more acceptable than without such referent.
The current study argues for a pragmatic account instead of a prosodic account of freezing (at least in the case of DP-fronting). The expectation is that there will be no significant effect of prosodic focus, but there will be a significant effect of the presence of a contextual anchor. In order to compare the prosodic account against the pragmatic account, production data will be gathered as well. If the prosodic account is on the right track the expectation is that wh-extraction is acceptable only when the moved constituent is focused. For the pragmatic account the prediction is that there is no correlation between the acceptability of a sentence and the prosodic focus in the sentence. It is important to note that the current study will not propose a complete new pragmatic analysis nor argue for one specific analysis, the goal is merely to provide empirical evidence that pragmatic factors play a major role in explaining this specific freezing phenomenon.
Experiment 1 tests the hypothesis that freezing cases are accommodated by having a contextually given referents to the fronted and contrastive DP. Moreover, Experiment 1 will provide evidence against a prosodic account of freezing as formulated by Culicover & Winkler (
In addition, participants are asked to produce the target stimuli in order to clarify which intonation pattern they have in mind when assessing the sentences. This experiment consists of two sub-experiments. The first sub-experiment (Experiment 1.1) consists of stimuli sentences without any context and Experiment 1.2 consists of stimuli sentences with a context introducing a referent.
The first sub-experiment sets out to test the additivity account to determine whether freezing is a phenomenon on its own or whether it can be derived from the joint effects of wh-extraction and DP-fronting. The second sub-experiment will tell us whether the freezing effect can be completely accounted for based on the presence of a contextually given referents. The results of these two sub-experiments will be combined to see the contribution of context/given-referent to the sentences containing fronting and wh-extraction.
Experiment 1.1 tests the effects of DP-fronting and wh-extraction on the acceptability of sentences presented out-of-the-blue, i.e. sentences without any context. This experiment by itself does not tell us which factors (i.e., syntactic, prosodic and/or pragmatic) have an effect on freezing, all it tests is the additivity account.
If freezing is a phenomenon on its own, one expects to find a significant interaction effect between fronting and extraction according to which the difference in fronting is larger in the
18 participants (6 males, 12 females) were recruited for Experiment 1.1, all were native speakers of North American English and currently students at McGill University. Each participant received a compensation of C$ 12 per hour. All of them were naive as to the purpose of the experiment.
In total there are 16 target sentences that each participant has to rate. These target sentences are controlled for two variables
(23) | a. | I think he attended the |
[C |
||
b. | Which royalty do you think he attended the |
|
[C |
||
c. | I think the |
|
[C |
||
d. | Which royalty do you think the |
|
[C |
All intonation contours on target sentences produced by participants were labeled either as having default, shifted, double focus, no focus or other intonation patterns. Each labeling will be explained one by one. The
A default prosody places the prominence on the final lexical head, see Example (24) (the focused constituent has been written in boldfaced):
(24) | ||
a. | I think he attended the |
|
b. | Which royalty do you think he attended the |
|
c. | I think the wedding of the king, he |
|
d. | Which royalty do you think the wedding of, he |
The shifted prosody is in some sense the opposite of the default prosody, the prominence of the sentence is placed on the second to last head, see (25).
(25) | ||
a. | I think he |
|
b. | Which royalty do you think he |
|
c. | I think the |
|
d. | Which royalty do you think the |
The double focus prosody combines both default and shifted prosody and places prominence on both the final head and second to last head (26). Lastly, any other kind of contour pattern is labelled as
(26) | ||
a. | I think he |
|
b. | Which royalty do you think he |
|
c. | I think the |
|
d. | Which royalty do you think the |
The experiment was conducted in the Prosody Lab at McGill University and was created using the Psychtoolbox in Matlab. The participants were seated in a sound-attenuated booth in front of a computer. They received written instructions asking them to first carefully read the sentences, then produce them as natural as possible and judge the sentences on a eight-point scale (1 being completely natural and 8 being completely unnatural).
By producing the sentences themselves, the participants presumably become more aware about how easy or hard it is to produce these sentences which will hopefully be reflected in the acceptability judgments. The reason for not simply asking the participants to read the sentences carefully was the fear that participants would potentially read over such a small word order difference like DP-fronting. Having to produce the sentences besides just reading them enforces the participants to read the sentences more carefully.
After reading the instructions, the first trial started and the participants were visually presented with the target sentence to be produced. After carefully reading the sentences, participants were asked to press the space key whenever they wanted to start recording the sentence. No correction of the recording could be made. After 5000 ms the input screen appeared automatically in which the participants were asked to judge the sentence. By pressing any key, the next trial would start. Participants proceeded through the experiment at their own pace. The participants were under no time pressure as to ensure they had enough time to process the sentences. The whole experiment took about 10 minutes.
The stimuli are presented to the participants in a Latin square design meaning that no participant saw the exact same item twice. Each condition is repeated four times and each repetition is taken from a different item set, making a total of 16 observations per participant.
The results from Experiment 1.1 are illustrated in
Results Experiment 1.1. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
To see whether the observations from the figure are significant a linear mixed effects analysis was run using R (
Similarly, the full model was a significant improvement to a model without extraction (AIC 1162) (
The full model with interaction effects (AIC 1139.4) did not significantly improve the model compared to a model without an interaction effect between fronting and extraction (AIC 1140) (
A quick look at the prosodic data shows that different participants apply different strategies to place prominence on a certain element, some apply higher intensity (e.g.
Production data without Fronting from female participant 9185. The line drawn indicates the pitch track. From the pitch track it becomes clear that the noun
Production data with Fronting from female participant 9171. The line drawn underneath the waveform indicates the intensity. Both from the waveform as well as the intensity drawing it becomes clear that the verb
Example production by female participant 1970. The line drawn indicates the pitch track. It becomes clear that the sentence was produced in a very monotonous manner.
Experiment 1.1 Production Data.
The results from experiment 1.1 show a significant main effect of fronting and extraction but no interaction effect between the two variables. All these results support an additive account of the freezing effect. If freezing was truly a phenomenon on its own, one would have expected an interaction effect between fronting and extraction which would indicate that the lower acceptability of frozen sentences cannot simply be predicted from the individual contributions of fronting and extraction on the acceptability judgments. More specifically, one would have expected the difference in fronting to be larger in the
Hofmeister et al. (
As becomes clear from the proportion graph for experiment 1, this is exactly the case (see
In line with previous experimental research on freezing, Experiment 1.1 supports the idea that freezing is best described as an additive effect. In addition, the production data are compatible with a prosodic account. Different from the prosodic account, I propose that lower acceptability ratings are caused by pragmatic factors rather than prosodic ones. Experiment 1.2 will test the prosodic account and compare it against a pragmatic account. In addition, Experiment 1.2 will tell how much of the additive effect can be ascribed to the presence of a context: Do both DP-fronting and wh-extraction improve by context, or just one of the two?
According to previous literature on DP-fronting, one of the requirements of fronting is the need for a contextually given referents (
Similarly, one could imagine that certain wh-question require a contextually given referents. All the stimuli in Experiment 1.1 contain a wh-word which presuppose the existence of a certain set of entities, or a so-called D-linked wh-word.
In Experiment 1.2 a contrastive context is added to the target sentences in order to see the effect of context on freezing. As already mentioned in the introduction, there is a intuition that these freezing sentences become more acceptable with the right contrastive focus context. The explanation for why freezing improves in such cases has been related to the hypothesis that extraction can only take place from a focused constituent (
More specifically, the prosodic account will be tested against a pragmatic account. The pragmatic account holds that DP-fronting requires a contextually given referents and the absence of such referent accounts for the apparent freezing effect. We will see that all contexts in Experiment 1.2 contain a contextual anchor with which the DP can associate. If the prosodic account is on the right track, one expects a significant effect of the context condition according to which only the DP-context significantly improves fronting, but not the VP-context. If on the other hand the pragmatic account is correct, no such significant effect should arise. In addition, this should be reflected in the prosody as well. If the prosodic account is on the right track, one expects DP-fronting to be more acceptable when that DP has been accented. For the pragmatic explanation to be true, no difference between the specific focus conditions is expected, but there should be a significant difference between Experiment 1.1 and Experiment 1.2, i.e. sentences without a contextually given referents versus sentences with a contextually given referents. Following the pragmatic account we expect to find a significant effect of context when comparing Experiment 1.1 with 1.2, but no significant effect between the two context conditions as would have been predicted by the prosodic account.
36 participants (16 males, 20 females) were recruited for experiment 1.2, all were current students at McGill University. Each participant received a compensation of C 12 per hour. The group of participants was split up in two groups, one group received target sentences with wh-extraction and the other one without wh-extraction. The reason for doing so was to keep the duration similar to experiment 1.1. 14 of them participated in the first sub-experiment and 12 of them participated in the second sub-experiment. All participants were naive as to the purpose of the experiment.
16 different item sets were created for this experiment. One such item set is given below in Example (28) and (27).
Each item set is defined for two variables with each two different settings, these are focus (i.e.
In order for the pre-sentences to have a contrastive effect on the target sentences, two contrastive item pairs are introduced, one contrastive DP pair and one contrastive verb pair. In this case for the DP pair,
Moving on to contrastive verb focus, in Examples (28b) and (28d) the verbs
(27) | ||
a. | It’s not that George attended the |
|
[C |
||
b. | It’s not that George |
|
[C |
||
c. | It’s not that George attended the |
|
[C |
||
d. | It’s not that George |
|
[C |
(28) | ||
a. | I know which royalty George attended the |
|
[C |
||
b. | I know which royalty George |
|
[C |
||
c. | I know which royalty George attended the |
|
[C |
||
d. | I know which royalty George |
|
[C |
The experiment is set up according to a between-subject design which means that one group of participants gets to see the extracted sentences and the other group the non-extracted ones. The reason for doing so is to make sure that there was no effect of trial due to boredom and to keep it as long as experiment 1.1. In the instructions the participants were told they would see 16 sentences which needed to be produced and then rated on a scale from 1 to 8 (1 being completely unnatural and 8 being completely natural). The stimuli are presented to the participant in a Latin square design, i.e. all participants see each condition. Each condition is repeated four times, but since they are picked from different item sets, there will be no identical trials. They were told that each sentence is preceded by a context. After reading the instructions, the participants were auditorily presented with a context. After the context ended, the experiment automatically continued to the next screen. The next screen showed the pre-sentence and target sentence to be produced separated by three dots. After carefully reading the whole sentence, participants were asked to press the space key to start recording the whole sentence, i.e. pre-sentence and target sentence (to make the recording more natural). After 5000 ms the input screen appeared automatically in which the participants were asked to judge only the last part of the sentence, i.e. the part following the three dots.
A total of 576 observations were collected, i.e. 36 participants * 16 stimuli = 576 observations. As becomes clear from
Results experiment 1.2. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
To see whether the observations made from the figure are significant a mixed linear effects analysis was run. In the final model focus, extraction, fronting and the interactions between fronting and focus, and extraction and fronting were added to the model. As random effects, by-subject and by-item random intercepts and slopes for all main effects were included in the model.
The full model without interactions (AIC 2328.6) did not perform better than the model without focus (AIC 2327.6) (
Different from Experiment 1.1 though, the full model with interactions (AIC 2320.1) performed significantly better than the model without an interaction effect between extraction and fronting (AIC 2327) (
Although no significant main effect of focus was found there was an interaction effect between focus and fronting. The full model performed significantly better than a model without this interaction effect (AIC 2322.1) (
Results experiment 1.2 without extraction. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
In contrast to experiment 1.1 where most sentences were produced with a default intonation pattern, Experiment 1.2 shows a clear prosodic pattern depending on the different conditions (see
Experiment 1.2 Production Data.
To see whether intonation had a significant effect on the acceptability ratings a mixed linear effects analysis was run. For the fixed effects, focus, extraction, fronting and intonation were added to the model as well as the interaction between fronting and extraction. As random effects, by-subject and by-item random intercepts and slopes for all main effects were included in the model.
So far we have seen that for Experiment 1.2 there is a significant effect of fronting on the acceptability of the sentence: sentences with fronted DPs are less acceptable than the ones without fronting. Interestingly, there is an interaction effect between fronting and extraction. This interaction effect indicates that the difference in fronting is larger in the
The prosodic data provide even more evidence against a prosodic account. The expectation is that the contrastive contexts should force the speaker to prosodically focus either the DP or verb with which a contrast is made. As expected, the
The results from Experiment 1.2 are compatible with a pragmatic approach. If the pragmatic account is on the right track one expects to find an improvement of adding a context for the
Even though from experiment 1.2 it is concluded that the focus manipulation (i.e. either VP focus or DP focus) did not have the expected effect on the acceptability ratings of the sentence, we will see that there is an effect of context in general which makes more sense. To see whether there is an effect of context on the acceptability ratings, experiments 1.1 (without context) and 1.2 (with context) were compared with each other. The results are shown in
Results experiment 1.1 and 1.2. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
Once again a mixed effects model was run: For the fixed effects, extraction, Fronting, presence of context and the interactions between the different variables were added to the model as well as a threeway interaction between all three main effects. As random effects, by-subject and by-item random intercepts and slopes for all main effects were included in the model.
Crucially, the mixed linear effects model shows that there is a significant three-way interaction between fronting, extraction and context. The full model (AIC 3451.4) performed significantly better than a model without this three-way interaction (AIC 3458.5) (
In addition, there is a significant interaction effect between context and extraction. The full model performed significantly better than a model without this interaction effect (AIC 3472.2) (
Results experiment 1.1 and 1.2 without fronting. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
Similarly, there is a significant interaction effect between
Results experiment 1.1 and 1.2 without extraction. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
In this experiment we have seen that the effects of wh-extraction and DP-fronting can be added up to account for the freezing effect (Experiment 1.1). Moreover, it has become clear that contrastive DP focus does not improve frozen sentences more than a contrastive verb focus (in fact the opposite was observed), as would have been predicted according to the prosodic account (Experiment 1.2). Context in general, on the other hand, does have an effect on frozen sentences (comparison between experiment 1.1 and 1.2): Adding a context improves the
A similar conclusion was drawn by Winkler et al. (
Notice that even though Winkler et al. (
The fact that there is no correlation between the production data and the acceptability judgments is unexpected for the prosodic account. We have seen that participants do produce the expected intonation contours based on the contrastive context preceding it, but their productions did not influence the acceptability judgments: the frozen sentences did improve with a contrastive DP context in which the moved DP from which extraction took place was accented, but so did a contrastive VP context. In other words it did not matter whether extraction took place from a focused constituent or not, the only thing that seemed to matter was the presence of a context containing an referential anchor.
We saw that experiment 1.1 mainly involved default intonation whereas in experiment 1.2 the focus shifted to the contrasted item. However it should be noted that for the condition in which prosody was expected to play the most important role, namely sentences with wh-extraction and a fronted embedded DP (i.e. frozen sentences) in a
Even though comparing the production data with the acceptability judgment data seems to provide evidence against a prosodic account, the results might have been obscured by the complexity of the task. Note that the participant is first asked to produce the sentence, and then judge that sentence they just produced. This is a rather unnatural and complicated setting. The reason for setting up the experiment like this was to extract production data from the participants. To make the task less complex and more natural experiment 2 was run. This experiment is very similar to Experiment 1.2 with the exception that the stimuli are presented auditorily rather than forcing the subjects to produce them themselves. This should make the task easier and clearer patterns in the results are expected.
Experiment 2 is similar to experiment 1.2 but instead of asking the participant to produce the target stimuli, the stimuli are auditorily presented. The participant’s task is to assess how acceptable the target sentence sounds to him/her. Rather than having to come up with the right prosody for the target sentences themselves, they will be provided with the ‘expected’ prosody.
Once again we expect a significant effect of context when comparing Experiment 1.1 to the results in this experiment, but no significant effect between the different context conditions as would have been predicted by a prosodic account.
A total of 18 participants were recruited for experiment 2 (7 males, 11 females). All of them were native speakers of North American English and were currently students at McGill University. Each participant received a compensation of C$ 12 per hour.
The materials and procedure are similar to experiment 1.2 except that participants have to rate pre-recorded stimuli. Both the context as well as the pre-sentence and target sentence were recorded for analysis purposes only. The target sentence was produced with emphasis on the constituent with which it contrasted in the pre-sentence, see Examples (28) and (27) for the produced patterns. The speaker mainly used intensity to mark a prosodic accent as becomes clear from
Example of a stimuli produced by a male speaker. The speaker uses intensity to mark a prominence. This becomes clear from the waveform.
The experiment was conducted in the Prosody Lab at McGill University and was created using the Psychtoolbox in Matlab. The stimuli were distributed according to a Latin square design meaning that no participant saw the exact same item twice. The participants were seated in a sound-attenuated booth in front of a computer. They received written instructions asking them to first carefully read the sentences, and judge the sentences after hearing them on a scale from 1 to 8. A total 32 stimuli were presented to the participant.
In the instructions the participants were told they would see 32 sentences which needed to be rated. After reading the instructions, the participants were presented with a context in written form. By pressing the space key, the next screen appeared which showed the pre-sentence and target sentence. After carefully reading the whole sentence, participants were asked to press the space key to hear the sentences. After 5000 ms the input screen appeared automatically in which the participants were asked to judge only the last part of the sentence, i.e. the part following the three dots. By pressing any key, the next trial would start. Participants proceeded through the experiment at their own pace. The participants were under no time pressure as to ensure they had enough time to process the sentences.
A total of 576 observations were collected, i.e. 18 participants * 32 stimuli = 576 observations. Looking at
Results experiment 2. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
To establish whether or not the observed differences are significant, a linear mixed effects analysis was performed using R (
There was no significant interaction effect between fronting and extraction. The full model (AIC 2132.8) was no improvement to a model without this interaction (AIC 2131.1) (
More importantly, there was no significant interaction effect between fronting and focus. The full model was no improvement to a model without this interaction (AIC 2131.4) (
The results from experiment 2 tell us that sentences with fronted DPs are judged less acceptable than sentences without fronted DPs. This is a robust effect we have seen throughout all of the experiments.
One of the main reasons to perform Experiment 2 was to test the prosodic account. Different from Experiment 1.2 and Winkler et al. (
The results are compatible with a pragmatic account, however, the fact that there was no effect of the specific contrastive focus context does not provide direct evidence for a pragmatic account. For a pragmatic account to be correct, it is expected that the
Comparing Experiment 1.1 (No-context) with Experiment 2 (Context), gives us a clearer pattern than the previous comparison between Experiment 1.1 and 1.2, as can be seen from
Results experiment 1.1 and 2. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
Once again a mixed effects model was run similar to the one in Experiment 1.2: For the fixed effects, extraction, fronting, context and the interactions between the different variables were added to the model. As random effects, by-subject and by-item random intercepts of all main effects were added to the model. The model comparison shows that both fronting and extraction improved the model in comparison to a model in which these variables were excluded. The full model (AIC 3363.8) significantly improved the model compared to a model without fronting (AIC 3711.7) (
The full model (AIC 3363.8) was also an improvement to a model without extraction (AIC 3395.2) (
More interestingly, there is a significant interaction effect between fronting and context. The full model (AIC 3345.3) was a significant improvement to a model without this interaction (AIC 3351) (χ2 (1, N = 864) = 7.691,
Results experiment 1.1 and 2 plotted without Extraction. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
A similar significant interaction effect was found between
Results experiment 1.1 and 2 plotted without Fronting. Error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.
Experiment 1.1 has shown us that the freezing effect can be described as an additive effect of
Important to keep in mind is that evidence for additivity is based on finding main effects but no interaction effects between certain syntactic processes. An interaction effect indicates that a certain syntactic phenomenon cannot simply be explained by the effects of the individual syntactic processes involved, instead it is the combination of these processes that gives rise to a certain phenomenon. However not finding interaction effects does not mean that there really are not any interaction effects. For instance, it could be that the experiment did not have enough power to detect such an interaction effect. On the other hand, this seems unlikely since similar results have been found for three different freezing phenomena: PP extraction (
Since both of these syntactic processes, i.e. wh-extraction and
Culicover & Winkler (
This still did not provide conclusive evidence that the prosodic account is incorrect since the subjects could have produced completely different prosodic contours not reflecting the expected patterns. However, the production data from Experiment 1.2 showed us that the participants did produce the expected prosodic patterns. More specifically, it showed that even if the moved constituent was prosodically focused, it did not make the freezing cases more acceptable, therefore rendering the prosodic account less plausible. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that even when the task was simplified and the subjects perceived the right prosody, there was still no effect of focus prosody on their acceptability judgments.
The comparison between Experiment 1.1 and 2 provides evidence showing that pragmatics plays a role in explaining the freezing effect. By keeping the target stimuli across the different experiments the same and therefore keeping their syntax the same, one can specifically see the effects of adding a context to these sentences with fronted DPs. Comparing Experiment 1.1 with 2 showed us that adding a context significantly improves sentences with a fronted DP. One shortcoming of the current study however is that it is not exactly clear what part of the context improves DP-fronting nor is it clear how the context improves DP-fronting. The improvement could either come from the pre-sentence or the context since both contain a contextually given referents. In section 3.2.2 it was explained how in the pre-sentence a contrastive item is introduced which could function as a contextual anchor to the fronted DP. What was not taken into account was that all fronted DPs are also referentially given in the context (see Appendix C).
Explanations for why DP-fronting would improve given a contextually given referents, are plenty and diverse. If taking Rooth (
On a different note, one could regard fronted DPs as D-linked elements. This makes sense since as we have seen in section 1.4, fronted DPs are dependent on previously mentioned elements in the discourse. D-linked elements require a higher level of initial activation in working memory compared to non D-linked elements, given their more referential nature (
On a similar note, the significant effect that context has on wh-extraction could be easily explained in terms of D-linked elements as well. All stimuli in this study consist of so called D (iscourse)-linked wh-words like
Notice how the pragmatic and processing account do not necessarily rule out one another, rather they seem to complement each other. It should become clear that a pragmatic phenomenon like the necessity of a contextual anchor can be explained from different perspectives that complement each other without having to choose one explanation over another. Important to note is that the aim of this study never was to propose a completely new analysis nor argue for one specific analysis, rather the aim was to provide empirical evidence showing that pragmatic factors play a significant role in explaining the freezing effect. Regardless of whether the improvement of fronted DPs comes from the pre-sentence or the context and regardless of how to account for this observation, the current research has shown that a contextually given referents significantly improves DP-fronting.
Although this study has only looked at embedded fronting constructions and their need for a contextual anchor, other constructions might have similar pragmatic requirements. The pragmatic function of extraposition for instance, has also been associated with definiteness, focus and topicalization (
Unfortunately, the pragmatic approach cannot account for the whole freezing phenomenon. The effect sizes that context has on for instance extraction and fronting are relatively small, so the freezing effect cannot be 100% explained in terms of a missing contextual anchor. Nonetheless, it can be concluded that the pragmatic account is part of the story explaining the freezing effect at least for frozen sentences involving DP-fronting. It thus seems that the freezing effect cannot simply be explained in terms of one account, rather different factors seem to play a role: these factors could be either constraints imposed by the grammar, processing difficulties or yet another factor. So instead of arguing for one account over the other, this study contributes to the debate by showing that at least pragmatic constraints play an important role in explaining the freezing effect.
Although this study acknowledges that pragmatic factors alone are not enough to explain the complete freezing effect and therefore other factors must be involved as well, the current research does show that the data cannot be explained by a prosodic account. In other words pragmatic factors contribute partially to the freezing effect, but other factors definitely play a role as well. However, when comparing the prosodic account against the pragmatic account the current study has made clear that the former account is not supported by the data and therefore the pragmatic account has more empirical coverage compared to a prosodic account. Which other factors contribute to the freezing effect and how much pragmatic factors play a role in the freezing effect compared to other factors is still left unanswered. This research has only been part of a small amount of experimental approaches to freezing and more research has to be done in order to get a more complete image of how these different factors interact with each other.
So far, it seems that a combination of structural factors, processing factors and pragmatic factors should be considered to account for the freezing effect. More research needs to be done to test how many factors play a role in accounting for the apparent freezing effect and how the different factors interact with each other.
The additional files for this article can be found as follows:
List of Standard Abbreviations. DOI:
Statistical Models. DOI:
Stimuli. DOI:
Although these “grammaticality” judgments have been generally accepted, it will become clear in the current study that such judgments are less categorical than often presented. From now on, the term
Note here that an assumption needs to be made in terms of the order of syntactic processes. The assumption here is that wh-extraction happens after the DP has moved to topic position, otherwise there would be no violation.
There is some disagreement among native speakers whether this is actually acceptable.
An interaction effect would indicate that there are extraneous effects that cannot be solely explained in terms of the individual variables.
As a safeguard against floor effects, the choice was made to use an eight-point scale rather than the more standard seven-point scale.
This experiment was performed as part of a big pool of several unrelated experiments. So even though the participants only took 10 minutes to finish this experiment, they spend a total of one hour each performing several experiments consecutively.
25 observations had to be removed due to the audio file either being cut off or the participants making background noises (like tapping on the table or making a lot of head movements) which interrupted the audio signal.
As noted by one reviewer a monotonous intonation may suggest shallow processing by the participant. This is definitely an issue, luckily not many monotonous intonations were produced.
See Appendix B for a full list of the stimuli used in this experiment as well as the instructions.
This is to ensure they are rating the same sentences as the ones in Experiment 1.1.
See
This means that a total of 88 (576 total observations-488 acceptable observations = 88) observations have been excluded, for similar reasons as in Experiment 1.1.
See
Expected prosody here means that main stress is put on the contrastive lexical item in the sentence.
The author has no competing interests to declare.