Agenda
Buhan Guo – Incremental processing of Tense Harmony and the disambiguation of clefted Relatives
NB: Buhan will present remotely, but the meeting will be streamed in room 0.19
Joint work with Nino Grillo (University of York), Sven Mattys (University of York), Andrea Santi (UCL), Shayne Sloggett (University of York), and Giuseppina Turco (CNRS – Université Paris Cité)
Language comprehension is a highly incremental process, as shown by ambiguity resolution and the processing of syntactic dependencies. In this talk, I focus on a structural contrast that allows us to examine both processes simultaneously: the ambiguity between string-identical Connected Clauses (1) and clefted Relative Clauses (2) in English it-clefts.
(1) It was [the gardener] [CC that was painting/*will paint the door].
(2) It was [the gardener [RC that was painting/will paint the door]] ([CC that called]).
The two structures are distinguished by Tense Harmony, a semantic constraint requiring temporal compatibility between clauses, which applies only to Connected Clauses (It was [the gardener] [CC that was painting/*will paint the door]). Using speeded acceptability judgments and G-Maze, we show that violations of Tense Harmony trigger immediate processing difficulty and lower acceptability, even though a grammatical Relative Clause parse is always available. These effects also persist when the distance between the two dependent elements is increased. This demonstrates that (i) Tense Harmony is computed incrementally, and (ii) clefted Relatives act as a garden-path structure, revealing a strong initial preference for the Connected Clause parse.
I will then present two follow-up experiments that probe the limits of such effects. First, we find evidence that readers do not successfully reanalyse a Connected Clause into a grammatical Relative Clause following a Tense Harmony violation. Instead, we suggest they may coerce the future tense into a counterfactual reading (e.g., interpreting will paint as was supposed to paint). Second, we show that even strong contextual support preceding the clefts is insufficient to prevent the garden-path effect, underscoring the robustness of the initial parsing commitment. We propose that this resistance likely reflects the need for joint structural-prosodic revisions, given independent evidence that Connected Clauses and clefted Relative Clauses have distinct prosodic patterns (Guo et al. 2025, Laboratory Phonology).
Taken together, this study introduces Tense Harmony as a new tool to study dependency formation and provides new evidence for the trade-off between reanalysis and coercion in garden-path resolution.
Teams
Meeting ID: 396 202 606 474 78
Passcode: 7io3XL9A