A Matter of Omission: a study on the comprehension and acceptability of doubly center-embedded sentences in English
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2016-08-30
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en
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Various studies have shown that double-embedded sentences with a missing VP can be found more comprehensible than their grammatical counterparts, in English. Ernst (2015) among others has found that this does not hold true for Dutch, but used a different methodology. The goal is to find out if changing the methodology to match that of Ernst will change the finding of a missing VP2 effect, either to match the original research by Gibson and Thomas (1998), or to match the finding by Ernst. Gibson and Thomas give three main theories that can predict which verb is preferably omitted. Frazier’s disappearing syntactic nodes hypothesis (1985), Gibson’s least recent nodes hypothesis (1991) and Gibson’s syntactic prediction locality theory (1998). The results confirm that using an online questionnaire does not seem to change earlier found results by Gibson and Thomas; sentences with a missing VP2 are rated as more comprehensible than sentences with a missing VP1 or a missing VP3. This study further backs Gibson's syntactic prediction locality theory, and rejects earlier studies in finding a missing VP effect through the disappearing syntactic nodes hypothesis and the least recent nodes hypothesis.
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Faculteit der Letteren