Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Nested garden-path sentences and the syntax-prosody interface
- Date
- Thursday 27 November 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.23
Abstract
The relative duration of linguistic units (syllables, words, phrases) is largely modulated by their structural and interpretive properties. At phrasal level, for example, pre-boundary lengthening (for English, Klatt 1976; Wightman et al. 1992), pauses (Breen et al. 2011; Watson and Gibson 2005), and domain-initial strengthening (Cho and Keating 2009) have been shown to constitute the main phenomena in which duration determines whether a boundary is perceived and what strength is associated with it (see discussion in e,g, Wagner and Watson 2010, Turk and Shattuck Hufnagel 2014; Dahan 2015, and references cited therein).
Duration, however, is not solely determined by structural factors. An influential line of inquiry has argued duration can be modelled as a function of predictability in both production and comprehension. Higher predictability is reliably associated with shorter duration in speech production, while less predictable elements of utterances are more carefully articulated, and thus produced more slowly (Lieberman 1963; Jurafsky 2001; Aylett 2000; Genzel 2002; Aylett and Turk 2004; Levy and Jaeger 2007; a.o.). Higher predictability also leads to shorter latencies (e.g. shorter response/reading times) in comprehension (Hale 2001; Levy 2008; among many others).
One complication in this literature is that the grammatical and predictability considerations often make aligned predictions in relation to duration, making it harder to disentangle their relative contribution; for example in the domain of prominence and focus (for discussion see e.g. Turk and Shattuck-Hufnagel 2014).
In this project, we show that there exists a set of well-defined structural environments in which lower predictability is associated with shorter duration: the contrast between syntactic sisterhood and nesting. More specifically, using data from production, I will show that grammatical factors lead to shorter duration for less predictable nested structures in a variety of well-known (as well as lesser studied) nested garden-path sentences. Results from auditory comprehension further show that prosody significantly attenuates or eliminates garden-path effects in a number of constructions previously assumed not to be prosodically disambiguated (e.g. the horse raced past the barn fell).
The discussion will also touch upon more specific issues at the Syntax-Prosody interface: nested garden-paths, in fact, might provide additional support for Wagner (2005, 2010)’s claim that syntax-prosody mismatches involving Relative Clauses (the mouse || that ate the cheese || that I left on the table) are best understood as involving extraposition.