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.
:::bibtex
@misc{TorresEtAl2023talk,
author = {Torres, Charles and Hanson, Kenneth and Graf, Thomas and Mayer, Connor},
title = {Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees},
year = {2023},
note = {Slides of a talk given at {SCiL} 2023, June 15--17, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts}
}