{"title":"New evidence on the Pseudorelative-First Hypothesis: Spanish attachment preferences revisited","authors":"Borja Alonso-Pascua","doi":"10.2478/topling-2020-0002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper is aimed at testing the Pseudo Relative-First Hypothesis in Spanish, a proposal that may settle the long-standing question of cross-linguistic variation in attachment preferences. This hypothesis predicts that whenever a Pseudo Relative (PR) is obtainable, it will be preferred for parsing over a genuine relative clause (RC). Assuming that PRs only allow for high attachment (HA), it follows that HA will be obtained when a PR is possible. To test this hypothesis, two experiments previously conducted in Italian will be replicated in Spanish with sentences containing PR-ambiguous and unambiguous RCs. In experiment 1 PR-availability is manipulated by modifying structural conditions, while in experiment 2 the PRs are only manipulated through semantic conditions. The results obtained show that PR-possible contexts do not yield the predicted HA. It will be argued that this finding, together with the data provided by the Italian experiments, only partially support the PR-First Hypothesis.","PeriodicalId":41377,"journal":{"name":"Topics in Linguistics","volume":"21 1","pages":"15 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Topics in Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2020-0002","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
Abstract This paper is aimed at testing the Pseudo Relative-First Hypothesis in Spanish, a proposal that may settle the long-standing question of cross-linguistic variation in attachment preferences. This hypothesis predicts that whenever a Pseudo Relative (PR) is obtainable, it will be preferred for parsing over a genuine relative clause (RC). Assuming that PRs only allow for high attachment (HA), it follows that HA will be obtained when a PR is possible. To test this hypothesis, two experiments previously conducted in Italian will be replicated in Spanish with sentences containing PR-ambiguous and unambiguous RCs. In experiment 1 PR-availability is manipulated by modifying structural conditions, while in experiment 2 the PRs are only manipulated through semantic conditions. The results obtained show that PR-possible contexts do not yield the predicted HA. It will be argued that this finding, together with the data provided by the Italian experiments, only partially support the PR-First Hypothesis.