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International audience; Heaviness (or phrasal length) has been shown to trigger mirror-image constituent ordering preferences in head-initial and head-final languages (heavy-late vs. heavy-first). These preferences are commonly attributed to a general cognitive pressure for processing efficiency obtained by minimizing the overall head-dependents linear distance-measured as the distance between the verb and the head of its left/right-most complement (Hawkins's Minimizing Domains) or as the sum of the distances between the verb and its complements (Dependency Length Minimization). The alternative language-specific accessibility-based production account, that considers longer constituents to be conceptually more accessible and views heavy-first as a salient-first preference, is dismissed because it implies differential sentence production in SOV and SVO languages. This paper studies the effect of phrasal length in Persian, a flexible SOV language displaying mixed head direction and differential object marking. We investigated the effect of linear distance as well as the effect of conceptual enrichment in two sentence production experiments. Our results provide clear evidence that support DLM while undermining Hawkins's MiD. However, they also show that some length effects cannot be captured by a dependency-distance-minimizing model and the conceptual accessibility hypothesis also needs to be taken into account to explain ordering preferences in Persian. Importantly, our findings indicate that distance minimization has a less strong effect in Persian than previously shown for other SOV languages.

International audience; Sprouse and Almeida (2017) provide a first systematic investigation of the sensitivity of four acceptability judgment tasks. In this project, we build on these results by decomposing those tasks into three constituent task features (single versus joint presentation, number of response options, and use of response labels), and explore the consequences of those task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment experiments. We present 6 additional experiments (for a total of 10) designed to probe the effect of those task features on sensitivity, both independently and in combination. Our results suggest three notable conclusions: (i) there is a clear advantage to joint presentation of theoretically-related sentence types, regardless of the type of response scale used in the experiment; (ii) tasks involving a continuous slider (which have an infinite number of response options, and few labels) offer good sensitivity, while relying solely on spatial reasoning rather than numeric reasoning; and (iii) there are a number of subtle interactions among the three task features that may warrant further investigation. We discuss the potential benefits and concerns of each of these features in detail, along with the relevance of these findings for deciding how to investigate both simple and higher-order acceptability contrasts.

International audience; Some sentences are globally informative but still deviant because they contain an expression that is redundant relative in its local environment, as in: #Ann is staying in Paris and she in France. In this case, the second conjunct seems to be evaluated after the first. In several frameworks, order of evaluation follows from linear order. Focusing on nominal modification in Japanese and Korean, Ingason (2016) argued that the correct notion of order is hierarchical, not linear, and he proposed that structurally higher elements are evaluated before lower elements, a conclusion that might dovetail with Romoli and Mandelkern's (2017) proposal for postposed if-clauses in conditionals. While agreeing with Ingason's conclusion that for nominal modification evaluation order is hierarchical, we amend his theory by considering sentences with several pre-or post-nominal modifiers (in English, Mandarin and French). We argue that a Noun Phrase is evaluated 'inside out', starting with the head noun and adding modifiers by order of structural proximity to the head-with the result that higher modifiers are evaluated later than lower modifiers (against the 'higher is earlier' view). We explore in an Appendix how this finding can be integrated with existing accounts of evaluation order for other constituent types, such as conjunction.

How much meaning can a morpheme have? Syntactic and morphological analyses generally underdetermine when distinctions in meaning between two forms are due to (i) the presence of an additional syntactic head or to (ii) different information coded on the same head. Surveying patterns across hundreds of languages, Bobaljik (2012) hypothesizes that superlative forms universally consist of a comparative morpheme plus an additional superlative morpheme, e.g., tallest is underlyingly [ SUP [ CMPR [ TALL ] ] ]. Bobaljik’s hypothesis includes, in part, a speculative proposal for a universal limit on the semantic complexity of morphemes. We offer a concrete basis for this proposal, the ‘No Containment Condition’ (NCC). The NCC is a constraint on grammars such that they cannot contain a certain semantic representation for a unitary head, if that representation can be constructed out of the semantic representations of two heads. Illustrating the proposal, we take Bobaljik’s analysis of forms like tallest further, into [ [ [ CMPR SUP ] MUCH ] TALL ]. Based in semantic analysis, our suggestion introduces Bresnan’s (1973) classical analysis of comparatives into the decomposition of superlatives.