Quantifier Raising leaves no overt marking to indicate movement has occurred, making the task of identifying when raising has occurred extremely difficult for the parser. Beyond this challenge, evidence from interpretation and judgement studies suggests that raising causes difficulty in processing. These two aspects taken together have led some to suggest that human sentence processor employs a strategy in which the construction of raised structures is avoided, commonly called processing scope economy. This contrasts to the traditional notion of grammatical scope economy, where Quantifier Raising is restricted in the grammar. In this paper we discuss the properties of these two theories. We conclude that the two approaches make different predictions about when raising should occur online, with processing scope economy predicting that the parser avoids raising whenever possible and grammatical scope economy predicting that the parser raises regularly and sometimes produces ungrammatical structures in the process. We then present an experiment which examines complex scope structures in verb phrase ellipsis to observe when penalties related to Quantifier Raising are observed online. We find that penalties appear in configurations where Quantifier Raising would be ungrammatical under grammatical scope economy, suggesting the parser attempts Quantifier Raising in these configurations. This evidence indicates that the parser’s behavior matches the predictions of grammatical scope economy rather than those of processing scope economy.
more »
« less
Processing gapping: Parallelism and grammatical constraints
This study aims to test two hypotheses about the online processing of Gapping: whether the parser inserts an ellipsis site in an incremental fashion in certain coordinated structures (the Incremental Ellipsis Hypothesis), or whether ellipsis is a late and dispreferred option (the Ellipsis as a Last Resort Hypothesis). We employ two offline acceptability rating experiments and a sentence fragment completion experiment to investigate to what extent the distribution of Gapping is controlled by grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints. Furthermore, an eye-tracking while reading experiment demonstrated that the parser inserts an ellipsis site incrementally but only when grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints allow for the insertion of the ellipsis site. This study shows that incremental building of the Gapping structure follows from the parser’s general preference to keep the structure of the two conjuncts maximally parallel in a coordination structure as well as from grammatical restrictions on the distribution of Gapping such as the Coordination Constraint.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1749580
- PAR ID:
- 10155122
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
- Volume:
- 73
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1747-0218
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 781 to 798
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
A central question of language comprehension concerns the interaction between linguistic form and broader representations of discourse in the interpretation of context-sensitive expressions. This interaction is instantiated in the interpretation of verb phrase ellipsis, where previous work has shown that the linguistic antecedent and the broader context are both considered in resolution. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we investigated VPE interpretation in discourses where the antecedent and the broader context make different information available for inclusion in the interpretation of the ellipsis site. Our results point to a complex interaction between linguistic antecedents and the broader discourse context in interpretation, putting considerable constraints on the set of possible models for VPE resolution. This work contributes to a better understanding of both the connections between and the boundaries separating linguistic structure and mental models of discourse contexts.more » « less
-
Reduced Energetic Disorders in Dion–Jacobson Perovskites for Efficient and Spectral Stable Blue LEDsAbstract Metal halide perovskites have witnessed great success in green, red, and near‐infrared light‐emitting diodes (LEDs), yet blue LEDs still lag behind. Reducing undesired energetic disorders – broadn‐phases and halide segregation – is considered as the most critical strategy to further improve the performances. Here, the study reports a newly designed and synthesized di‐ammonium ligand with rigidπ‐conjugated rings and additional methyl groups to construct Dion–Jacobson (DJ) structure. Augmented coordination from the extra ammonium site and increased effective bulkiness from methyl groups lead to better distribution control over conventional mono‐ammonium ligands. This enhances the radiative recombination of blue emissions in the film with homogeneous energy landscape and improved surface morphology, as evidenced by a series of imaging and mapping techniques. As a result, it demonstrates DJ perovskite LEDs (PeLEDs) with peak external quantum efficiencies of ≈4% at 484 nm and ≈11% at 494 nm, which are among the top reported for pure DJ phase‐based PeLEDs in the corresponding wavelength regions. The results deepen the understanding of regulating energetic disorders in perovskite materials via molecular engineering.more » « less
-
Solar hosting capacity analysis (HCA) assesses the ability of a distribution network to host distributed solar generation without seriously violating distribution network constraints. In this paper, we consider risk-sensitive HCA that limits the risk of network constraint violations with a collection of scenarios of solar irradiance and nodal power demands, where risk is modeled via the conditional value at risk (CVaR) measure. First, we consider the question of maximizing aggregate installed solar capacities, subject to risk constraints and solve it as a second-order cone program (SOCP) with a standard conic relaxation of the feasible set of the power flow equations. Second, we design an incremental algorithm to decide whether a configuration of solar installations has acceptable risk of constraint violations, modeled via CVaR. The algorithm circumvents explicit risk computation by incrementally constructing inner and outer polyhedral approximations of the set of acceptable solar installation configurations from prior such tests conducted. Our numerical examples study the impact of risk parameters, the number of scenarios and the scalability of our framework.more » « less
-
Oxalate decarboxylase is an Mn- and O2-dependent enzyme in the bicupin superfamily that catalyzes the redox-neutral disproportionation of the oxalate monoanion to form carbon dioxide and formate. Its best-studied isozyme is from Bacillus subtilis where it is stress-induced under low pH conditions. Current mechanistic schemes assume a monodentate binding mode of the substrate to the N-terminal active site Mn ion to make space for a presumed O2 molecule, despite the fact that oxalate generally prefers to bind bidentate to Mn. We report on X-band 13C-electron nuclear double resonance (ENDOR) experiments on 13C-labeled oxalate bound to the active-site Mn(II) in wild-type oxalate decarboxylase at high pH, the catalytically impaired W96F mutant enzyme at low pH, and Mn(II) in aqueous solution. The ENDOR spectra of these samples are practically identical, which shows that the substrate binds bidentate (κO, κO’) to the active site Mn(II) ion. Domain-based local pair natural orbital coupled cluster singles and doubles (DLPNO-CCSD) calculations of the expected 13C hyperfine coupling constants for bidentate bound oxalate predict ENDOR spectra in good agreement with the experiment, supporting bidentate bound substrate. Geometry optimization of a substrate-bound minimal active site model by density functional theory shows two possible substrate coordination geometries, bidentate and monodentate. The bidentate structure is energetically preferred by ~4.7 kcal/mol. Our results revise a long-standing hypothesis regarding substrate binding in the enzyme and suggest that dioxygen does not bind to the active site Mn ion after substrate binds. The results are in agreement with our recent mechanistic hypothesis of substrate activation via a long-range electron transfer process involving the C-terminal Mn ion.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

