Frank Keller and Theodora Alexopoulou: Gradience and Parametric Variation

Gradient grammaticality has received renewed attention in recent years, which is partly due to the introduction of the magnitude estimation paradigm that allows the elicitation of reliable gradient judgments. In the present contribution, we apply this methodology to the study of crosslinguistic variation. We present a series of experiments that investigate the interaction of resumption and island violations in English, German, and Greek. The results demonstrate that resumptive pronouns (contrary to claims in the literature) cannot remedy island violations. Also, we find that embedding reduces acceptability, even in constructions thought to be fully acceptable in the literature. On the other hand, resumption can counteract the effect of embedding in certain cases. On a more general level, we find that crosslinguistic variation in resumption is confined to quantitative differences in the magnitude of otherwise identical principles. This poses an important challenge for a parametric approach to variation, which does not predict existence of such quantitative difference between languages. We propose that this type of variation can be accounted for naturally in a weighted grammar model such as Linear Optimality Theory, were a distinction between hard and soft constraints is possible.

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