More Like this

1. Typological Implications of Tier-Based Strictly Local Movement

   Graf, Thomas (January 2022, Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics)

   Earlier work has shown that movement, which forms the backbone of Minimalist syntax, belongs in the subregular class of TSL-2 dependencies over trees. The central idea is that movement, albeit unbounded, boils down to local mother-daughter dependencies on a specific substructure called a tree tier. This reveals interesting parallels between syntax and phonology, but it also looks very different from the standard view of movement. One may wonder, then, whether the TSL-2 characterization is linguistically natural. I argue that this is indeed the case because TSL-2 furnishes a unified analysis of a variety of phenomena: multiple wh-movement, expletive constructions, the that-trace effect and the anti-that-trace effect, islands, and wh-agreement. In addition, TSL-2 explains the absence of many logically feasible yet unattested phenomena. Far from a mere mathematical curiosity, TSL-2 is a conceptually pleasing and empirically fertile characterization of movement. 

   more » « less
2. Sensing Tree Automata as a Model of Syntactic Dependencies

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-5702  

   Graf, Thomas; Santo, Aniello De (January 2019, Proceedings of the 16th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language)

   Various aspects of syntax have recently been characterized in subregular terms. However, these characterizations operate over very different representations, including string encodings of c-command relations as well as tiers projected from derivation trees. We present a way to unify these approaches via sensing tree automata over Minimalist grammar dependency trees. Sensing tree automata are deterministic top-down tree automata that may inspect the labels of all daughter nodes before assigning them specific states. It is already known that these automata cannot correctly enforce all movement dependencies in Minimalist grammars, but we show that this result no longer holds if one takes into account several well-established empirical restrictions on movement. Sensing tree automata thus furnish a strong yet uniform upper bound on the complexity of syntactic dependencies. 

   more » « less
3. Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees

   https://doi.org/10.7275/nz4q-6b09  

   Torres, Charles; Hanson, Kenneth; Graf, Thomas; Mayer, Connor (January 2023, Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics)

   We fuse two recent strands of work in subregular linguistics—probabilistic tier projections (Mayer, 2021) and tier-based perspectives on movement (Graf, 2022a)—into a probabilistic model of syntax that makes it easy to add gradience to traditional, categorical analyses from the syntactic literature. As a case study, we test this model on experimental data from Sprouse et al. (2016) for a number of island effects in English. We show that the model correctly replicates the superadditive effects and gradience that have been observed in the psycholinguistic literature. 

   more » « less
4. Tier-based strict locality and the typology of agreement

   https://doi.org/10.15398/jlm.v13i1.411  

   Hanson, Kenneth (January 2025, Journal of Language Modelling)

   This paper presents a subregular analysis of syntactic agreement patterns modeled using command strings over Minimalist Grammar (MG) dependency trees (Graf and Shafiei 2019), incorporating a novel MG treatment of agreement. Phenomena of interest include relativized minimality and its exceptions, direction of feature transmission, and configurations involving chains of agreeing elements. Such patterns are shown to fall within the class of tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) languages, which has previously been argued to subsume the majority of long-distance syntactic phenomena, as well as those in phonology and morphology (Graf 2022a). This characterization places a tight upper bound on the range of configurations that are predicted to occur while providing parameters for variation which closely match the observed typology. 

   more » « less
5. Structure Sensitive Tier Projection: Applications and Formal Properties

   De Santo, Aniello; Graf, Thomas (August 2019, FG 2019)

   The subregular approach has revealed that the phonological surface patterns found in natural language are much simpler than previously assumed. Most patterns belong to the subregular class of tier-based strictly local languages (TSL), which characterizes them as the combination of a strictly local dependency with a tier-projection mechanism that masks out irrelevant segments. Some non-TSL patterns have been pointed out in the literature, though. We show that these outliers can be captured by rendering the tier projection mechanism sensitive to the surrounding structure. We focus on a specific instance of these structure-sensitive TSL languages: input-local TSL (ITSL), in which the tier projection may distinguish between identical segments that occur in different local contexts in the input string. This generalization of TSL establishes a tight link between tier-based language classes and ISL transductions, and is motivated by several natural language phenomena. 

   more » « less