Abstract 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.
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:::bibtex
@inproceedings{torres2023modeling,
title={Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees},
author={Torres, Charles and Hanson, Kenneth and Graf, Thomas and Mayer, Connor},
booktitle={Proceedings of the {S}ociety for {C}omputation in {L}inguistics 2023},
pages={155--164},
year={2023}
}