Minimality in verb-cluster formation

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Lingua 119 (2009) 1458–1481 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua

Minimality in verb-cluster formation Markus Bader *, Tanja Schmid Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany Received 2 July 2007; received in revised form 25 March 2008; accepted 28 March 2008 Available online 14 September 2008

Abstract In a German verb-final sentence with several verbs there are in principle two ways to structure the input string. Either each verb embeds a phrasal constituent to its left, or the verbs form a complex cluster without phrasal embedding. The verbal cluster is favored in several respects. First, it is the minimal structure necessary to parse the given input sequence. Second, it is more right-branching than the non-clustering variant and therefore favored by both grammar and parser. However, the structure with verbal cluster has a drawback which has often been overlooked: It implies non-trivial operations on argument-structure unification. In this article, we will present experimental evidence for both parts of the conflict: (i) evidence that a strive for structure minimization favors the clustering variant; (ii) evidence that cluster formation quickly leads to processing complexity. This evidence mainly comes from experiments on the so-called ‘‘long-distance passive’’ that appears with passivization of control verbs. In comparison to easy-to-process sentences with extraposed infinitival clauses, intraposed infinitival clauses lead to increased processing load. However, even if the intraposed infinitival clause is dissolved in favor of a verbal cluster, processing load effects are visible, reflecting cluster-internal argument-structure composition. # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Minimality; Sentence comprehension; Infinitival complementation; Verb-cluster formation; Long-distance passive

1. Introduction The idea that less structure is better than more structure has figured prominently both in syntactic theory and in work on human parsing. Within syntactic theory, we can discern at least three different ways of how considerations of minimality have shaped ongoing research. On the most general level, the notion of minimality has been used in arguments over the devices that a syntactic theory has to include. Minimality in this sense has figured prominently in the debates starting in the mid-seventies of whether a grammar needs to incorporate a transformational component or not (cf. Newmeyer, 1986). More recently, considerations of this kind have been the driving force for the development of the Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory (Chomsky, 1995) whose overarching aim is to minimize the theoretical apparatus used by the grammar. On a more concrete level, considerations of minimality have been adduced to argue for or against analyses of particular phenomena within one and the same overall syntactic theory. For example, even when the availability of movement operations as part of the grammar is taken for granted, particular syntactic phenomena might be analyzed either by invoking movement or by base-generation. As we will explain shortly, a phenomenon of this kind is the centerpiece of the current investigation. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 7531 88 4753; fax: +49 7531 88 4459. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Bader), [email protected] (T. Schmid). 0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2008.03.003

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The two senses of minimality discussed thus far apply on a meta-theoretical level, helping to decide between competing frameworks or between competing analyses. According to a third notion of minimality, minimality plays a role within the grammar itself, for example by incorporating economy principles that chose the derivation out of a given set which is derived by the fewest movement operations. Within psycholinguistic work on human parsing, the notion of minimality has mainly figured as part of the parsing process itself. Following a long tradition, we will use the term Human Sentence Processing Mechanism (HSPM) for all processes involved in assigning syntactic structures to input sentences during language comprehension. The idea that the HSPM uses minimality considerations in situations of local syntactic ambiguity in order to decide which among a set of alternative syntactic structures to pursue originated with Frazier’s seminal work on human parsing principles (Frazier, 1979; Frazier and Rayner, 1982). Frazier postulated the principle of Minimal Attachment which says that a word should be attached to the current phrase-structure tree using as few nodes as possible (for a related principle, cf. the principle of Simplicity introduced in Gorrell, 1995). The upshot of adhering to a principle like Minimal Attachment is that the parser will always construct the most economical phrase-structure tree for a given input string. In this paper, we focus on infinitival complementation in German in order to address the issue of minimality in both grammar and parser. Since German is an OV-language, infinitival complements can easily occur to the left of their selecting matrix verb. This is shown by the sentence in (1). The relevant aspects of the syntactic structure of (1) are shown in (2). (1)

. . . dass Max [PRO den Roman zu lesen] versucht. that Max the novel to read tries ‘. . . that Max tries to read the novel.’

While (2) looks rather innocuous when considered as a syntactic object, the same is not true from the HSPM’s point of view. In fact, a structure as in (2) is problematic on two counts. First of all, (2) is an instance of center-embedding, and sentences exhibiting center-embedding are known to lead to enhanced processing complexity (for an overview, cf. Gibson, 1998). As illustrated in (3), repeated center-embedding quickly leads to incomprehensibility. (3)

The patient who the nurse who the clinic had hired admitted met Jack.

A sentence like (1) with its structure (2) is problematic for reasons of local syntactic ambiguity as well. The local ambiguity results from the fact that the embedded infinitival clause is not introduced by any kind of element which would signal to the HSPM that a new clause must be opened, as complementizers or relative pronouns do for finite clauses. After processing the initial string dass Max den Roman, the sentence is still compatible with a single-clause analysis, as witnessed by (4). (4)

. . . dass Max den Roman liest. that Max the novel reads ‘. . . that Max reads the novel.’

Whether computing the most economical or the most frequent structure, the HSPM will not postulate a clausal boundary before the second DP den Roman on its first run through the sentence. Thus, a bi-clausal structure as in (2) will have to be erected post-hoc, after both verbs have been seen in the input (if it is erected at all, see further discussion below).

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From the vast literature on syntactic ambiguity resolution, it is well known that overlooking a clausal boundary on first-pass parsing can cause additional parsing complexity, a so-called garden-path effect. This is simply an instance of the general phenomenon that recovery from an initial misanalysis – reanalysis – is costly. Two well-known examples of overlooking clausal boundaries are provided in (5) (both from Frazier and Rayner, 1982). (5)

a. b.

Since Jay always jogs a mile and a half seems like a very short distance to him. The second wife will claim the inheritance belongs to her.

Intuitions as well as experimental evidence (e.g., Frazier and Rayner, 1982; Sturt et al., 1999) show that a garden-path effect is observable for both (5a) and (5b), and that the cost of introducing a clausal node on reanalysis varies widely: (5a) causes a severe processing disruption but (5b) is repaired easily. Given the problem of center-embedding and the problem of initial misanalysis, it may come at no surprise that the grammar offers alternative ways for structuring a string like (1). A first option is to put the infinitival clause behind the matrix verb by means of extraposition, as shown in (6).

For VO languages, extraposition is a common device to reduce processing load caused by center-embedding and related constructions (e.g., heavy-NP shift in English). A defining characteristic of extraposition is that it leads to a change in word-order. In the construction under consideration, for example, the infinitival complement and the embedding control verb switch position as a result of extraposition. In addition to extraposition, a second mechanism for reducing the parsing complexity caused by infinitival clauses has been postulated for the West-Germanic OV-languages. This is the mechanism of clause-union which does not affect the linearization of the string but only its syntactic structure. The essential parts of the clause-union structure for sentence (1) are shown in (7).

The string in (7) has two noteworthy properties. First, the two verbs zu lesen and versucht have been joined to form a single verbal constituent, the so-called verb-cluster. Since (7) contains only a single, albeit complex verb-cluster, it also contains only a single clausal node. Thus, clause-union leads to a mono-clausal structure whereas the structure we considered first is a bi-clausal one. Note that we indicate the syntactic category of the verb-cluster as Vn because no consensus has been reached so far in the literature as to the exact nature of the cluster in a mono-clausal structure. We discuss this question shortly in the next section.

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Given the lack of any overt word-order changes, clause-union is not directly observable at the surface, but certain indicators nevertheless argue for the existence of structures as in (7) in addition to structures as in (6). We provide a short review of these arguments in the next section. At this point, it suffices to note that the mono-clausal structure in (7) solves the two parsing problems identified for the bi-clausal structure in (2) at once. Because (7) does not contain an embedded infinitival clause, it is neither an instance of center-embedding nor does it contain a clausal bracket which might be overlooked on first-parse parsing. The fact that a mono-clausal structure as in (7) avoids the two problems associated with the locally ambiguous center-embedding structure in (2) has not gone unnoticed in the linguistic and psycholinguistic literature on the HSPM. In fact it has been argued that the very existence of clause-union phenomena in OV-languages in German and Dutch is a response of the grammar to pressures imposed by requirements of efficient parsing (e.g., Haider, 2003; Lo¨tscher, 1978). While we fully subscribe to this view, we also note that there are reasons to suspect that verb-cluster formation introduces parsing costs on its own. Consider the two trees in (8).

Both verbs in (8) (V2 read and V1 tries) assign two theta roles each. Since V2 and V1 do not form a verb-cluster in the tree in (8a), they can assign theta roles to their arguments in a local and transparent way: V2 (read) assigns both theta roles immediately to the arguments in its clausal domain (PRO and NP2 in our example), and V1 (tries) in turn assigns its theta roles to CP2 and NP1. The corresponding tree with verb-cluster formation is shown in (8b). Neither the theta roles of V2 nor those of V1 can be assigned in the same local and transparent manner as in the tree without verb-cluster. For example, V1 does not combine with its argument CP2 but with V2 instead, whereas V2 does not immediately combine with its NP argument NP2 but with V1. We take the linking of an argument with its corresponding position in the argument structure of the verb (that is, functional application) as the minimal operation necessary for evaluating argument structures, where evaluating an argument structure involves both operations leading to case checking and operations leading to semantic structures. A tree like (8a), which does not involve verb-cluster formation, requires only the minimal argument-structure operation just defined. A tree with verb-cluster formation, as in (8b), requires more than this minimal operation. In particular, it requires the merging of two argument structures (functional composition). In the following, we will say that a tree as in (8a) fullfills compositional minimality but a tree as in (8b) does not, and hypothesize that sentences containing verbclusters should be associated with additional processing costs for this reason. To test this hypothesis, we will focus on a construction which suggests that the verbs in a verb-cluster do not only form a unit on the phrase-structural level, but also on the level of argument structure. This construction is the so-called LONG-DISTANCE PASSIVE which is illustrated in (9). (9)

?dass [der Roman]-NOM [zu lesen versucht wurde]. that the novel to read tried was ‘that someone tried to read the novel.’

The peculiar property of the long-distance passive is that the matrix verb (versucht) is passivized but the effect of passivization – the promotion of accusative object to subject – is visible on the internal argument of the embedded infinitival complement of versucht. Of course, if the two verbs indeed form a verb-cluster as described above, the longdistance passive is what one would expect, because what is passivized is the verb-cluster as a whole, and the effect of passivization is visible on the internal argument of the verb-cluster. Cases of long-distance passive were first reported in Ho¨hle (1978) where their occurrence was claimed to be restricted to the verb versuchen. Later, however, long-distance passive has been seen as the result of verb-cluster formation in general, and has been used as a test on the syntactic nature of infinitival complementation as well

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(e.g., Bayer and Kornfilt, 1990; Haider, 1993). Nevertheless, the grammatical status of the construction is under dispute. For example, whereas Wurmbrand (2001) makes extensive use of this construction in her discussion of restructuring infinitives, in their review of Wurmbrand (2001), Reis and Sternefeld (2004) declare the long-distance passive as a marginal phenomenon at best. The empirical evidence adduced so far (questionnaire data by Wo¨llsteinLeisten, 2001; corpus data by Wurmbrand, 2003) suggests that this construction is accepted and used in more than just a marginal way. However, the grammatical status of the long-distance passive cannot be considered settled, and an additional aim of the current paper is therefore to shed further experimental light on this issue. To this end, we use the method of speeded-grammaticality judgments in our experiments. This method requires from participants to judge sentences under tight time constraints. So far, this method has mainly been used for investigations of the HSPM (e.g., Bader and Bayer, 2006; Ferreira and Henderson, 1991), but it can also be used to probe the grammatical status of sentences when issues of processing complexity are not at stake (for illustrative applications, see Bader and Schmid, 2006; Bader and Schmid, submitted for publication). In the present paper, we combine these two objectives and use the method of speeded-grammaticality judgments to gain insight into matters of processing as well as grammar. In the remainder of this paper, we will take sentences exhibiting long-distance passive as our major tool for investigating the suspected trade-off between phrase-structural and compositional minimality. We will adduce a range of experimental evidence showing that both bi-clausal structures as in (2) and mono-clausal structures as in (7) cause enhanced processing load in comparison to extraposed structures as in (6). Before presenting this evidence, some additional syntactic background information on infinitival complementation in German is introduced in the next section. Afterwards, we discuss the processing of sentences with infinitival complementation by the HSPM and then present three experiments that have gathered grammaticality judgments in a controlled way. The upshot of these experiments will be that in the case of infinitival complementation in German, neither bi-clausal nor mono-clausal structures are ideally suited to the purposes of the HSPM. An issue addressed in the general discussion section is why these structures then exist at all, given that extraposition into a position following the matrix verb is also a grammatical option in German – an option that fits the needs of the HSPM without any drawbacks, as shown both by theoretical considerations and experimental evidence. 2. Clause-union phenomena in German German is considered to be an SOV language because objects typically precede the verb. This requirement holds strictly for nominal objects. Finite object clauses, in contrast, have almost obligatorily to be extraposed behind the matrix verb. Infinitival complement clauses show a somewhat mixed behavior in this regard. First of all, infinitival complements can appear intraposed, that is, they can occupy the same preverbal position as nominal complements. This is shown in (10) for three types of matrix verbs: (10a) contains a modal verb; (10b) and (10c) contain control verbs of two different types as will be explained shortly. (10)

a.

Max hat gestern das neue Buch lesen wollen. M. has yesterday the new book read want ‘Yesterday, Max wanted to read the new book.’

b.

Max hat gestern das neue Buch zu lesen versucht. Max has yesterday the new book to read tried ‘Yesterday, Max tried to read the new book.’

c.

Max hat mich gestern das neue Buch zu lesen gezwungen. Max has me yesterday the new book to read forced ‘Yesterday, Max forced me to read the new book.’

Since the work of Bech (1955/57), it is generally assumed that there are two types of sentences containing intraposed infinitivals. For descriptive purposes, we refer to these two sentence types with the traditional terms non-coherent versus coherent construction. In non-coherent constructions, the infinitive and its complement(s) behave like a joint constituent. This constituent may be extraposed and it forms a barrier for clause-bounded operations. Coherent constructions, in contrast, are transparent for these operations and show also other signs of simple clauses containing a single verb. Verbs with infinitival complement differ in the kind of construction they license. Some can only be constructed coherently, others only non-coherently, and still others can be used in both constructions.

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Several syntactic tests have been identified distinguishing coherent and non-coherent constructions (cf. Bech, 1955/ 1957; Grewendorf, 1988; von Stechow and Sternefeld, 1988). Below, we use a small selection of these tests in order to demonstrate the existence of the three verb classes just mentioned (obligatorily coherent, obligatory non-coherent, and optionally coherent). When we first look at the most prototypical property of non-coherent constructions, namely extraposition of the embedded verb together with its complement(s), the pattern shown in (11) emerges. (11)

a.

*Max hat gewollt [das neue Buch lesen]. Max has wanted the new book read

b.

Max hat versucht [das neue Buch zu lesen]. Max has tried the new book to read

c.

Max hat mich gezwungen [das neue Buch zu lesen]. Max has me forced the new book to read

If extraposition of the embedded verb together with its complement(s) leads to a grammatical sentence as in (11b) and (11c), we are dealing with a non-coherent construction whereas we are dealing with a coherent construction if this is not the case as shown for a modal verb in (11a). According to extraposition, both types of control verbs pattern together in showing non-coherence properties in contrast to modal verbs. It is generally assumed that extraposed infinitival complements form a single constituent. With regard to the category of this constituent, however, no agreement has been reached so far, with answers ranging from VP to IP to CP (for critical discussion, see Kiss, 1995). For present purposes, nothing hinges on this point. For the sake of concreteness, we will assume that extraposed infinitivals are clauses, i.e., CPs. We next look at a typical property of coherent constructions, topicalization of matrix verb and embedded verb, i.e., movement to the specifier position of CP. Here, a different pattern emerges, as shown in (12a) for a modal verb construction, and in (12b) and (12c) for control verb constructions. (12)

a.

[Lesen wollen] hat Max gestern das neue Buch. read want has Max yesterday the new book

b.

[Zu lesen versucht] hat Max gestern das neue Buch. to read tried has Max yesterday the new book

c.

*[Zu lesen gezwungen] hat Max mich gestern das neue Buch. to read forced has Max me yesterday the new book

If matrix verb and embedded verb can be topicalized together as shown for the modal verb wollen (‘to want’) in (12a) and for the control verb versuchen (‘to try’) in (12b), we are dealing with a coherent construction. If, however, topicalization of matrix and embedded verb leads to ungrammaticality of the sentence, as shown for the control verb zwingen (‘to force’) in (12c), we are dealing with a non-coherent construction. According to this test, a certain class of control verbs like versuchen patterns together with modal verbs in showing coherence properties. This class contrasts with another class of control verbs whose members like zwingen construct non-coherently. Another syntactic coherence test is ‘‘long’’scrambling of a pronoun. This test, which is illustrated in (13), makes use of the fact that scrambling across clause boundaries generally leads to ungrammaticality. When, however, scrambling of a pronoun of the embedded infinitival in front of the subject of the matrix clause is grammatical, it is assumed that there are no clause boundaries between matrix and embedded verb, and we are thus dealing with a coherent construction. (13)

a.

Was das Buch betrifft, so ist klar, warum [es]i Max t i lesen will. what the book concerns so is clear why it Max read wants

b.

Was das Buch betrifft, so ist klar, warum [es] i Max t i zu lesen versucht. what the book concerns so is clear why it Max to read tries

c

*Was das Buch betrifft, so ist klar, warum [es] i Max mich t i zu lesen zwingt. what the book concerns so is clear why it Max me to read forces

According to this test, a control verb like versuchen again patterns together with a modal verb like wollen in showing a coherence property, i.e., allowing long scrambling of a pronoun, in contrast to a control verb like zwingen.

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To sum up, three different verb classes result from the (non-)coherence tests discussed above: First, the class of verbs that obligatorily construct coherently, including modal verbs (ko¨nnen ‘can’, mu¨ssen ‘must’, etc.) and raising verbs (scheinen ‘seem’, drohen ‘threaten’). The verbs of this class pass all coherence tests, and do not allow extraposition of their verbal complements. Verbal complements of control verbs, in contrast, can freely appear either extra- or intraposed. Only a subclass of control verbs like zwingen ‘force’ fails all coherence tests and thus clearly constructs non-coherently. Another subclass of control verbs like versuchen ‘try’ forms a separate class by showing both properties of non-coherent constructions (e.g., extraposition of verbal complements) and coherent constructions (e.g., topicalization, long scrambling of a pronoun). We will concentrate on this last verb class in the following. Whereas the differences between coherent and non-coherent infinite constructions are well established on the descriptive level, their correct syntactic analysis is still a matter of ongoing debate (for an overview, see Wurmbrand, 2006). Two main kinds of approaches can be distinguished: the base generation and the derivational account. The basegeneration approach takes the distinction between coherent and non-coherent infinitival complements at face value by postulating that a bi-clausal structure is base-generated for the non-coherent construction and a mono-clausal structure for the coherent construction. In the ‘‘radical’’ version of this approach, the syntactic structure of a coherent infinitival construction equals the syntactic structure of a sentence without any infinitival complementation. The only difference is that in the coherent case a verb-cluster is base-generated at the position where a single verb is inserted in a simple sentence. This kind of base-generation approach has been proposed in the Principles-and Parameters framework (cf. Haider, 1993; Williams, 2003), and also in non-derivational syntactic theories, including Combinatory Categorial Grammar (starting with Steedman, 1983) and Head-Driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (e.g., Kiss, 1995; Meurers, 2000). For purposes of illustration we show the two possible structures for a sentence like (10b) in (14) and (15):

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A less radical version of the base-generation approach has recently been proposed by Wurmbrand (2007), who assumes base-generated VP complements for the mono-clausal structure instead of literal verb-cluster formation. Under this account, the lack of functional structure above the infinitival complement is argued to be sufficient in order to account for the clause-union properties of coherent constructions. The derivational approach assumes that coherent constructions are derived from bi-clausal structures by various types of movement operations, sometimes followed by a restructuring process leading to verb-cluster formation (cf. Cinque, 2004; Evers, 1975; Haegeman and van Riemsdijk, 1986; Koopman and Szabolcsi, 2000; Roberts, 1997; Sabel, 1996). These approaches are too heterogeneous and too complex to be discussed in more detail here. Syntactic argumentation has not led to the general acceptance of one approach. In this paper, we follow the ‘‘radical’’ base-generation approach, and we argue in due course that this approach leads to the most natural account of our experimental data. Comparisons with the VP-embedding account of Wurmbrand (2007) and the derivational account are given in the general discussion. We now turn to the long-distance passive, the construction we investigate in the upcoming experiments. As we have just discussed, a clause with a matrix control verb in the active voice can receive either a bi-clausal or mono-clausal structure as long as no trigger for either of the two constructions is present. Without such a trigger, the structures do not differ visibly – neither in order of elements nor in morphology. If, however, the matrix verb is passivized and the infinitival verb subcategorizes an accusative object, the structures can be distinguished easily. In a coherent construction, another case is assigned to the (former) direct argument of the embedded infinitive than in a non-coherent construction. Before we come to intraposed constructions with a passivized control verb, let us first take a closer look at the extraposed variants. An example for both an active and a passive sentence is shown in (16). (16)

a.

Extraposed infinitival: active dass Maria versucht hat, [CP den Kuchen zu essen]. that M. tried has the-ACC cake to eat

b.

Extraposed infinitival: passive dass versucht wurde, [CP den Kuchen zu essen]. that tried was the-ACC cake to eat

In extraposed constructions, which are always bi-clausal, there is no difference between the infinitival complements no matter whether they are the complements of an active or a passive matrix verb. The accusative object of the embedded infinitive is not affected by passivization of the matrix control verb. It remains the object of the embedded clause and stays in the accusative. The same is true when an infinitival clause is intraposed and assigned a bi-clausal structure, as in (17): (17)

a.

Intraposed non-coherent infinitival: active dass Maria [CP den Kuchen zu essen] versucht hat. that M. the-ACC cake to eat tried has

b.

Intraposed non-coherent infinitival: passive dass [CP den Kuchen zu essen] versucht wurde. that the-ACC cake to eat tried was

In a bi-clausal structure, intraposed infinitival complements behave like extraposed infinitival complements in that the accusative object of the embedded infinitive does not change its case and syntactic function under passivization of the matrix verb. In contrast, passivization of the matrix verb has an effect on the accusative object of the embedded infinitive if the two verbs have merged to form a mono-clausal structure, as shown in (18): (18)

a.

Intraposed coherent infinitival: active dass Maria den Kuchen [V zu essen versucht hat]. that M. the-ACC cake to eat tried has

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b.

Intraposed coherent infinitival: long-distance passiv dass der Kuchen [V zu essen versucht wurde]. that the-NOM cake to eat tried was

When the accusative object of the embedded infinitive becomes the nominative subject under passivization of the matrix verb, as in the example above, we are dealing with a coherent construction. As already mentioned in the introduction, the grammatical status of this so-called ‘‘long-distance’’ passive is under dispute. With the experimental results we present in this paper we hope to shed some light on this issue. To sum up this section, we give both the bi-clausal and the mono-clausal structure of an intraposed passive of a control verb as tree diagram in (19) and (20), respectively:

In the following we investigate how the parser handles infinitival complementation in German and concentrate especially on parsing differences between the two kinds of intraposed infinitivals introduced above. We will argue that degraded grammaticality judgments that arise with these kinds of structures as opposed to extraposed infinitival complements are due to conflicting minimality requirements imposed by the parser rather than to ungrammaticality per se. Before we present our experimental evidence, we introduce the notion of minimality as it applies to the HSPM – the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism – and discuss how sentences with infinitival complementation in German might be processed by the HSPM in accordance with minimality requirements.

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3. Minimal structure building and infinitival complementation In very general terms, the task of the HSPM consists of integrating each word of a sentence into a well-formed syntactic representation. We will make three general assumptions about how the HSPM accomplishes this task. First, in accordance with a great deal of experimental work, we assume that the HSPM parses sentences in an incremental manner, as stated by the Left-to-Right Constraint of Frazier and Rayner (1988) which we give in (21). (21)

Left-to-Right Constraint (Frazier and Rayner, 1988) Each item is incorporated into a constituent structure representation of a sentence (essentially) as the item is encountered.

Our second assumption concerning the HSPM is that it computes a single, fully specified syntactic structure at all points in time. Such a parser, which is called a serial parser in the psycholinguistic literature, contrasts with parallel parsers which can compute several alternative structures for inputs which are syntactically ambiguous, and minimal commitment parsers which can delay (certain aspects of) processing when faced by an ambiguous input string. While the assumption of serial parsing is not as widely shared as the assumption of incremental parsing, it is still wellsupported by the empirical evidence (cf. Mitchell, 1994). From time to time, a serial HSPM – that is, a parser computing a single syntactic structure and adhering to the Left-to-Right Constraint – will inevitably be confronted with a situation in which a word can be integrated into the unfolding phrase-structure tree in more than a single way. In such situations of local syntactic ambiguity, the HSPM is forced to make a decision in advance of sufficient information. In contrast to our first two assumptions about the HSPM, the principles used by the HSPM to arrive at a definite integration decision are highly controversial. For reasons of space, we assume without further discussion that one of the driving forces behind the HSPM is a strive for minimal structure building, and show that such an assumption makes a lot of sense in the context of infinitival complementation. The idea that syntactic ambiguity resolution is governed by considerations of minimality was first proposed by Frazier (1979) who formulated the Minimal Attachment Principle that is shown in (22). (22)

Minimal Attachment Attach incoming material into the phrase-marker being constructed using the fewest nodes consistent with the well-formedness rules of the language under analysis.

Later principles in the same spirit are Simplicity formulated by Gorrell (1995) and Minimal Everything of Inoue and Fodor (1995). A parser working according to the three assumptions that we have just introduced – the Left-to-Right Constraint, serial parsing, and Minimal Attachment – will always try to integrate each lexical item of the input string into a single unfolding phrase-structure representation in the most economical way. Due to local ambiguities in the input string, the most economical structure built at some earlier point can be contradicted by later input material. If this happens, revision processes must be invoked in order to transform the initial structure into the ultimately correct one. Such revision processes are normally visible in enhanced processing complexities, so-called garden-path effects. How are German sentences containing an infinitival complement to the left of an embedding control verb processed if the HSPM works in accordance with the three assumptions that we have adopted above? The main interest in such sentences lies in the fact that they are structurally ambiguous between a mono-clausal and a bi-clausal syntactic structure. Our three assumptions about the HSPM jointly imply the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis which is given in (23). (23)

Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis On first-pass parsing, the HSPM always assigns a mono-clausal structure to a sentence containing an intraposed infinitival complement.

The Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis is an immediate consequence of the fact that computing the bi-clausal structure involves more nodes at its left edge. As illustrated in (24), when YP is the next constituent to integrate, then

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computing a bi-clausal structure involves additional nodes, namely a VP and all clausal nodes above it (e.g., a CP-node if infinitival clauses are CPs).

The Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis predicts that a mono-clausal structure, that is, a structure with a verb-cluster, is computed for sentences containing an intraposed infinitival complement. While a phrase-structure tree of this sort is easy to assemble for the HSPM, computing such a tree is not everything the HSPM has to do. In particular, the argument structures of the verbs in the verb-cluster have to be merged in order to determine the correct distribution of case features and semantic argument properties (a.k.a. thematic roles). As we have argued in the introduction, these are non-minimal operations which are not necessary in structures without clusters. We thus complement the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis with the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis which is given in (25). (25)

Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis The argument-structure operations involved in verb-cluster formation are costly for the HSPM.

We next present three experiments that have investigated sentences with passivized control verbs in order to test the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis and the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis. The experimental procedure that is used in all of the upcoming experiments is the procedure of speeded-grammaticality judgments. This method requires from participants to judge sentences as either grammatical or ungrammatical as quickly as possible. Judgments are given as soon as the last word of the sentence has been read. The method delivers two types of results: percentages of judgments ‘grammatical’ and reaction times, separately for judgments ‘grammatical’ and judgments ‘ungrammatical’. The method of speeded-grammaticality judgments has both its strengths and its weaknesses. In our opinion, the strengths outweigh the weaknesses in the context of the current investigation. The main weakness of this method is that it requires a single judgment after the presentation of the sentence is complete. In this sense, this method is an off-line, not an on-line method. Note, however, that in the kind of sentences which are of main interest for the current investigation, the decisive piece of information is provided by the verb-cluster in clause-final position. Giving a judgment at the end of the sentence thus does not introduce any significant delay between information intake and decision. Furthermore, Bader and Ha¨ussler (2005) have directly compared an on-line reading method (selfpaced reading) and the off-line method of speeded-grammaticality judgments and have found that both lead to highly similar results for sentences in which the crucial information is provided by the verb in clause-final position. In a sense, the distinction between off-line and on-line seems to get blurred in this particular configuration (which is of course not uncommon for a verb-final language). A decisive advantage provided by speeded-grammaticality judgments in the context of the current investigation is the fact that speeded-grammaticality judgments inform us about the grammaticality of experimental sentences in a controlled way. As was pointed out above, the proper status of sentences exhibiting long-distance passive has been the subject of controversial discussions. By obtaining grammaticality judgments in an experimentally sound way, the current study will help in resolving the data questions surrounding the long-distance passive. This kind of information would not be provided by pure on-line measures like reading times.1

1

On-line data from selfpaced reading for some of the constructions investigated here can be found in Bader and Lasser (1994).

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4. Experiment 1 As a first test of the two hypotheses stated at the end of the preceding section, Experiment 1 investigates sentences containing a control verb with an intraposed infinitival complement. In all sentences, the control verb appears in the passive voice. What is varied is the case of the internal argument of the infinitival complement and the adjacency between infinitival and control verb. In three conditions, infinitival verb and control verb are adjacent to each other, as shown by the examples in (26). (26)

Infinitival and control verb adjacent a. Es wurde berichtet, dass der alte Vater zu entlasten versucht wurde. it was reported that the-NOM old father to disburden tried was ‘It was reported that one had tried to disburden the old father.’ b. Es wurde berichtet, dass den alten Vater zu entlasten versucht wurde. the -ACC c. Es wurde berichtet, dass die alte Mutter zu entlasten versucht wurde. the-NOM/ACC

(26a) and (26b) contain an unambiguously case-marked masculine DP within the embedded clause. In (26a), the DP is marked for nominative; this sentence is accordingly an instance of the long-distance passive construction. In (26b), the DP is marked for accusative, and the infinitival complement must therefore form a clausal unit of its own. (26c), finally, contains a feminine DP which is case ambiguous between nominative and accusative. For the HSPM, it should be easy to assign a phrase-structure representation to a mono-clausal (long-distance passive) sentence as in (26a). However, if the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis is correct, difficulties should arise when the argument structures of the verbs in the verb-cluster have to be fused. Bi-clausal sentences as in (26b) are also predicted to present difficulties to the HSPM, albeit for different reasons. For such sentences, the HSPM will first compute a mono-clausal structure according to the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis. Somewhere during the processing of the clause-final verb-cluster, the mono-clausal structure must be revised to a bi-clausal structure, resulting in enhanced processing costs. Sentences with a feminine DP as in (26c) are compatible both with a mono- and with a bi-clausal structure because feminine DPs are always case ambiguous between nominative case and accusative case. Again, the HSPM will first compute a mono-clausal structure. Within such a structure, the feminine DP might in principle be assigned either nominative or accusative case. However, since case-ambiguous DPs are preferentially assigned nominative case if possible (for a review, cf. Bader and Bayer, 2006), we end up with a structure containing a nominative-marked DP, that is, with a structure which is compatible with the long-distance passive. While this is quite similar to sentences with an unambiguous nominative DP, there is still an important difference: In case of difficulties with verb-cluster formation, the initial structure can also be revised to a bi-clausal structure with a concomitant change of nominative to accusative case. That is, someone who dislikes the long-distance passive has no other choice than rejecting sentences with an unambiguous nominative DP; for sentences with a caseambiguous DP, in contrast, the possibility of reanalysis remains. As is the case with classical garden-path sentences, the first-analysis (mono-clausal with nominative DP) leads to a temporary ungrammaticality which can be cured to an acceptable structure (bi-clausal with accusative DP). In sum, given the availability of both structural options, we predict that sentences with a feminine DP should be judged better than sentences with a masculine DP. In addition to sentences in which infinitival verb and control verb are adjacent to each other, Experiment 1 includes sentences in which adverbial material is inserted between these two verbs. Applying this kind of manipulation to the sentences in (26) results in the three sentences in (27). (27)

Infinitival and control verb non-adjacent a. *Es wurde berichtet, dass der alte Vater zu entlasten doch noch einmal versucht wurde. it was reported that the-NOM old father to disburden but still once tried was ‘It was reported that after all, one had tried once again to disburden the old father.’

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b. c.

Es wurde berichtet, dass den alten Vater zu entlasten doch noch einmal versucht wurde. the -ACC Es wurde berichtet, dass die alte Mutter zu entlasten doch noch einmal versucht wurde. the-NOM/ACC

The main interest of including sentences in which infinitival verb and control verb are not adjacent to each other lies in the fact that an adverbial behind the infinitival verb is an obligatory trigger for the assignment of a bi-clausal structure. Sentences like (27b) with an accusative object can thus serve as an independent measure of the difficulty of computing a bi-clausal structure for the sentences under consideration. Since the trigger for bi-clausality is more transparent in (27b) than in (26b), (27b) should be easier to process than (26b). Sentences with an unambiguous nominative DP as in (27a) do not have a well-formed syntactic structure and should therefore be rejected for purely grammatical reasons. Sentences with a case-ambiguous feminine DP as in (27c) allow the same kind of bi-clausal structure as sentences like (27b) and should therefore be judged equally well. 4.1. Method 4.1.1. Participants Thirty-six students of the University of Konstanz participated in Experiment 1. Participants were either paid or they received course credits. All participants were native speakers of German and naive with respect to the purpose of the experiment. Since the same participant information applies to all upcoming experiments, it will not be repeated there. 4.1.2. Materials Thirty sentences were created for Experiment 1 with each sentence appearing in six versions according to the two factors  Adverbial (with versus without adverbial separating infinitival verb and control verb) and DP Type (masculine/nominative versus masculine/accusative versus feminine/case-ambiguous). A complete sentence set from the original experimental materials has already been provided in (26) and (27). As shown there, all sentences consisted of a main clause followed by an embedded clause introduced by the complementizer dass (‘that’). The control verb and its infinitival complement were always part of the embedded clause. Thus, all experimental sentences adhered to the schema shown in (28). (28)

Main clause [dass DP[NOM/ACC] V-infinitival (Adverbial) V-control wurde]

All DPs had animate referents. The following five control verbs were used in six sentences each: versuchen (‘to try’), beginnen (‘to begin’), anfangen (‘to start’), erlauben (‘to allow’), befehlen (‘to order’). These verbs were selected on the basis of a prior study in which a large set of control verbs was tested for acceptability in coherent structures (for details, cf. Schmid et al., 2005). The five verbs that were selected for the present study were among those that were judged best in coherent constructions. In other words, these are all verbs which clearly allow for clause-union to occur; they are thus prime candidates for the long-distance passive. From the total set of 30 sentences, six lists were created. Each list contained an equal number of sentences in each condition but no more than one version of any sentence appeared in a list. Each list of experimental sentences was embedded in a list of 186 filler sentences. These filler sentences represented a wide variety of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences and were partly taken from unrelated experiments. Each participant saw only a single list of filler and experimental sentences. The order in which items in a list were presented was pseudo-randomized individually for each participant. 4.1.3. Procedure Sentences were presented visually using the DMDX software developed by K. Forster and J. Forster at Monash University and the University of Arizona. Participants were seated in front of a computer monitor. They were told that they would be presented sentences on the screen and that their task was to judge the grammaticality of each sentence as quickly and as accurately as possible. The concept of grammaticality was explained by examples. Participants initiated each trial by pressing the space-bar which triggered three fixation points to appear in the center of the screen for 1050 ms. Thereafter, the sentence appeared on the screen in a word by word fashion with each word appearing at the

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Table 1 Percentages of judgments ‘grammatical’ and mean reaction times (ms) to make judgments ‘grammatical’ for Experiment 1 Adverbial

Percentage grammatical Judgment time

+Adverbial

Masculine nominative

Masculine accusative

Feminine

Masculine nominative

Masculine accusative

Feminine

50 (5.0) 768 (59)

63 (5.0) 725 (52)

76 (4.7) 737 (42)

37 (5.4) 707 (53)

74 (5.1) 691 (52)

72 (5.1) 644 (32)

Standard errors (by participants) are shown in parentheses.

same position (mid-screen). Each word was presented for 225 ms plus additional 25 ms for each character to compensate for length effects. There was no interval between words. Immediately after the last word of a sentence, three red question marks appeared on the screen, signaling to participants that they now were to make their judgment. Participants indicated their judgment by pressing either the left or the right shift key on a computer keyboard. They used their right hand to indicate that a sentence was grammatical and their left hand to indicate that it was ungrammatical. If participants did not respond within 2000 ms, a red warning line ‘‘zu langsam’’ (‘too slow’) appeared on the screen and the trial was finished automatically. Prior to the experimental session, participants received practice trials to ensure that they had understood the task. During the practice trials but not during the experimental session participants received feedback as to the correctness of their judgments. 4.2. Results In this and all following experiments, analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were performed on percentages of judgments ‘grammatical’ with either participants (F1) or items (F2) as random factors. 4.2.1. Judgments Table 1 shows the percentages of responses ‘grammatical’ for the six conditions of Experiment 1. Two-way ANOVAs (2  Adverbial  3 DP Types) revealed a significant main effect of DP Type (F1(2,70) = 25.07, p < .001; F2(2,58) = 36.69, p < .001) but no significant main effect of  Adverbial (both F-values <1). Importantly, the interaction between DP Type and  Adverbial was also significant (F1(2,70) = 4.52, p < .05; F2(2,58) = 8.61, p < .001). One way to look at the interaction is by noting that the presence versus absence of an adverbial had different effects depending on DP type. When the sentence contained a masculine nominative DP, sentences without adverbial were judged better than sentences with adverbial (50% versus 37%; t1 = 2.31, p < .05; t2 = 3.19, p < .01). For sentences with accusative DP, in contrast, sentences without adverbial received less judgments ‘grammatical’ than sentences with adverbial (63% versus 74%; t1 = 1.91, p < .06; t2 = 2.64, p < .05). For sentences with a feminine DP finally, presence versus absence of adverbial had no significant effect (both t-values <1). 4.2.2. Judgment times Mean judgment times for judgments ‘grammatical’ are also shown in Table 1. We do not present statistical analyses for reaction times because of the problem of too many empty cells. By and large, there is an inverse relationship between percentages of responses ‘grammatical’ and reaction times for these responses: High percentages go together with faster reaction times, and low percentages with slower reaction times. While this inverse relationship does not hold perfectly, it indicates that reaction times basically reflect how confident participants are when giving their response. 4.3. Discussion Experiment 1 provides first evidence for the two hypotheses that were stated above, the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis and the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis. As predicted by these hypotheses, judgments on sentences with intraposed infinitival clauses were clearly degraded. Sentences with long-distance passive received only 50% judgments grammatical. Judgments on sentences with a bi-clausal structure were judged as grammatical with 63%

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when the infinitival complement directly preceded the clause-final control verb and bi-clausality was therefore only indirectly signaled by means of case requirements; when bi-clausality was signaled overtly by an adverbial, judgments were higher and reached 74%. The interpretation of these results is complicated by the fact that the two hypotheses under consideration predict processing difficulties in all conditions. Since Experiment 1 did not include conditions for which processing should have proceeded without problems, there is no baseline against which to measure processing cost. In particular, given that all sentences contained intraposed infinitival complements, one might worry whether we are simply dealing with a general complexity effect here. For example, if intraposed infinitivals formed center-embedding structures throughout (either on the VP or the CP level), could this alone predict the degraded judgments that we found in Experiment 1? There are both reasons internal to Experiment 1 and reasons that derive from a comparison of the current results with results from other experiments using the same methodology which argue that the answer to this question must be no. Let us first consider an argument based on the current results. Note first that among the morphologically unambiguous conditions, the condition which was judged best in the current experiment was the condition with a masculine accusative DP and an adverbial phrase in between infinitival verb and control verb; this adverbial is an overt signal for the existence of an embedded infinitival clause. This is a condition which involves center-embedding according to any theory of infinitival complementation in German. Another condition that unquestionably involves center-embedding is the condition with a masculine accusative DP but no additional adverbial phrase. This condition was judged worse than the corresponding condition with an adverbial phrase. This difference would remain unexplained if center-embedding per se would be the major determinant of processing load for the sentences under consideration. In fact, if center-embedding alone would be the problem, the reverse should be expected because sentences with an adverbial are syntactically more complex than sentences without. Most syntactic analyses of German would assume that the complement clause of a control verb is base-generated as a sister of the control verb. When the complement clause precedes an adverbial, it must therefore have been moved to this position. Thus, sentences with adverbial are an instance of scrambling and should therefore be more difficult to process than sentences without adverbial, contrary to what was found in Experiment 1. In addition, there is a large pool of experiments which have examined German verb-final clauses by the means of speeded-grammaticality judgments. When simple active or passive verb-final clauses not involving center-embedding or garden-path effects are tested, one usually gets judgment rates of about 90% grammatical, as shown for example by many of the experiments in Bader and Bayer (2006). For sentences containing complex verb-clusters involving modal verbs, the results are on average somewhat lower, although they are still in the range of 80–90% (Bader and Schmid, submitted for publication). Sentences containing a center-embedded relative clause also lead to judgments around 80% (e.g., Experiments 1 and 2 of Chapter 5 of Bader and Bayer, 2006). Finally, even with two degrees of centerembedding, judgments can be higher than what we found in the current experiment. Besides other sentences, Bader et al. (2003) investigated doubly center-embedded sentences as in (29). In this sentence, an embedded complement clause contains a relative clause which in turn itself contains a relative clause. (29)

Ich befu¨rchte, dass heute morgen das Programm, das den Programmierer, I fear that this morning the program which the programmer der die Dokumentation vo¨llig ohne irgendeine Hilfe erstellen musste, who the documentation completely without any help write had-to gea¨rgert hat, abgestu¨rzt ist. annoyed has crashed is ‘I’m afraid that this morning the program which has annoyed the programer who had to write the documentation completely without any help has crashed.’

Despite the high syntactic complexity caused by center-embedding, sentences like (29) were still judged as grammatical with 76% in the experiment by Bader et al. (2003). Note furthermore that sentences like (29) are not only more complex than the sentences considered here because of the higher degree of center-embedding but also in terms of the number of arguments that have to be processed. The sentences investigated in the current experiment always contained a single argument whereas the results just summarized were obtained for sentences containing two arguments, a subject and an object, as a minimum.

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In summary, given the broad range of prior results obtained with the very same experimental procedure that was used here, it seems safe to conclude that the results of the current experiment must be due to processing difficulties far beyond those to be expected for reasons of center-embedding alone. This is surely so for masculine sentences without an adverbial. The 50% for sentences with nominative DP and the 63% for sentences with accusative DP point to sources of processing difficulty clearly more severe than problems typically caused by center-embedding. As for the sentences with accusative DP, which are instances of bi-clausal structures, we have hypothesized that the parsing difficulties come about because these sentences induce a garden-path effect (see the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis in (23)): The HSPM starts with a mono-clausal structure which later has to be revised to a bi-clausal one. This interpretation also fits the finding that for sentences with an accusative object, inserting an adverbial made processing somewhat easier. In terms of the diagnosis model of Fodor and Inoue (1994), the adverbial provides an overt, phrase-structural symptom clearly signaling to the HSPM that an infinitival clause has to be constructed. Without the adverbial, the only cue to bi-clausality is the case marking of the DP. This is a less direct cue to biclausality, and it is of course present in sentences with adverbial too. We stop our discussion of current results at this point because some of the findings obtained above are in need of further clarification, especially when considered in terms of absolute levels of acceptability. First, sentences with longdistance passive were judged as grammatical with 50%. While it was expected – both on theoretical grounds and from discussions in the syntactic literature – that long-distance passive sentences should give rise to degraded grammaticality judgments, a value of 50% might still seem remarkably low. A short survey of the linguistic literature on long-distance passive reveals that almost all examples contain inanimate subjects whereas the sentences of Experiment 1 had an animate subject throughout. Experiment 2 investigates whether judgments of long-distance passives improve if inanimate subjects are used instead of animate ones. A second somewhat unexpected finding is provided by the 37% judgments ‘grammatical’ for sentences with a nominative DP and an adverbial separating infinitival verb and control verb. For such sentences, a much lower acceptance rate was expected because the adverbial should have enforced a bi-clausal structure which is not compatible with nominative case for the object of the infinitival verb. In an additional control experiment we have tested the ‘‘case competence’’ of our subject population. In this experiment, subjects had no difficulties at all to correctly reject nominative case in infinitival clauses when the infinitival clause was extraposed. We thus conclude that our experimental participants have no difficulties with case, but that the processing load in the sentences under consideration is too high to allow a more reliable detection of case errors. 5. Experiment 2 Experiment 2 was run in order to test whether sentences with long-distance passive containing an inanimate subject receive higher acceptance rates than corresponding sentences with an animate subject. The contrast between an animate and an inanimate subject will be tested in three structural contexts. The first two contexts were already part of Experiment 1: Sentences with intraposed infinitival complements, adjacency between infinitival and control verb, and either a nominative DP (long-distance passive) or an accusative DP (bi-clausal structure). Two example sentences illustrating our animacy manipulation in these contexts are shown in (30). (30)

Intraposed infinitival complement a. Es ist gut, dass (der jden) Roman zu lesen versucht wurde. it is good that (the-NOMjthe-ACC) novel to read tried was ‘It is a good thing that someone tried to read the novel.’ b.

Es ist gut, dass (der jden) Schu¨ler zu motivieren versucht wurde. it is good that (the-NOMjthe-ACC) student to motivate tried was ‘It is a good thing that someone tried to motivate the student’

In the third structural context included in Experiment 2, the infinitival clause appears in extraposed position, as shown in (31). In extraposed infinitival clauses, the internal argument of the infinitival verb must bear accusative case, and therefore only accusative DPs occur in this condition. The infinitival complement contains an inanimate object in (31a) and an animate one in (31b).

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(31)

Extraposed infinitival complement a. Es ist gut, dass versucht wurde, den Roman zu lessen it is good that tried was the-ACC novel to read b.

Es ist gut, dass versucht wurde, den Schu¨ler zu motivieren. it is good that tried was the-ACC student to motivate

Sentences with extraposed infinitival complement serve two purposes. First, they can act as a baseline with which to compare sentences with intraposed infinitival clauses. Such a baseline was missing from Experiment 1. For sentences with extraposition, we would expect very high acceptance rates, substantially higher than for either kind of intraposed sentence. In addition, for these sentences there are no grammatical reasons to expect that animacy should have an effect. Any differences that might nevertheless show up between sentences like (31a) and (31b) can thus be taken to reflect general factors including overall plausibility and lexical frequencies which might cause subtle differences in acceptability. Having a measure for such differences is important when interpreting possible differences due to animacy in the conditions with intraposed infinitival clauses. 5.1. Method 5.1.1. Participants and procedure Fifty-four students of the University of Konstanz participated in Experiment 2. The same speeded-grammaticality judgment procedure was used as in Experiment 1. 5.1.2. Materials The experimental materials for Experiment 2 consisted of 30 sentences appearing in six versions each, according to the two factors Structure (intraposed/accusative versus intraposed/nominative versus extraposed) and Animacy (animate versus inanimate). Example sentences illustrating the six conditions of Experiment 2 were already given in (30) and (31). Sentences with animate DPs were adopted from Experiment 1. In addition to the two intraposed structures which were already part of Experiment 1, an extraposed structure was created by putting the infinitival complement behind the passivized control verb. Sentences with an inanimate DP were created new for this experiment. Sentences with inanimate DPs differed only in two respects from sentences with animate DPs: First, animate nouns were replaced by inanimate nouns. All nouns were masculine nouns in order for case to be unambiguously marked on the determiner. Second, when the infinitival verb was not compatible with both animate and inanimate objects, it was replaced by a verb taking an inanimate object. Six sentence lists were prepared in the same way as described for Experiment 1. The experimental sentences were presented interspersed with 178 filler sentences again representing a wide spectrum of syntactic structures. 5.2. Results 5.2.1. Judgments Table 2 shows the percentages of judgments ‘grammatical’ for Experiment 2. Two-way ANOVAs (3 Structures  2 Animacy) revealed that both the two main effects and the interaction between them were significant (main effect of Structure: F1(2,106) = 55.22, p < .001; F2(2,58) = 71.26, p < .001; main effect of Animacy: F1(1,53) = 55.26, p < .001; F2(1,29) = 37.66, p < .001; interaction between Structure and Animacy: F1(2,106) = 17.32, p < .001; F2(2,58) = 16.03, p < .001). Table 2 Percentages of judgments ‘grammatical’ and mean reaction times (ms) to make judgments ‘grammatical’ for Experiment 2 Inanimate

Percentage grammatical Judgment time

Animate

Extraposed

Intraposed, acc

Intraposed, nom

Extraposed

Intraposed, acc

Intraposed, nom

95 (1.4) 547 (28)

71 (3.9) 682 (43)

71 (3.9) 662 (40)

91 (1.9) 528 (26)

62 (4.4) 664 (42)

42 (4.2) 759 (51)

Standard errors (by participants) are shown in parentheses.

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The interaction between the two factors Structure and Animacy reflects the finding that sentences with animate DP were always judged worse than sentences with inanimate DP, but the magnitude of the effect varied greatly. For sentences with extraposition, the 4% difference was not significant (t1 = 1.03, n.s.; t2 = .99, n.s.). For intraposition sentences with accusative DP, there was a slightly larger and significant 9% difference (t1 = 2.75, p < .01; t2 = 2.65, p < .05). For intraposition sentences with nominative DP, that is, for sentences exhibiting long-distance passive, there was a substantial and significant 29% difference (t1 = 8.94, p < .001; t2 = 8.60, p < .001). 5.3. Discussion Experiment 2 has two major outcomes. First, with passivized control verbs, intraposed infinitival complements are substantially less acceptable than extraposed infinitival complements. This is true independently of whether the internal argument of the infinitival verb is animate or inanimate. This strengthens the evidence already provided in Experiment 1 for the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis and the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis. Since Experiment 2 also included sentences with extraposition, and these were judged almost perfectly, we can now exclude the possibility that the degraded judgments for sentences with intraposed infinitival are caused by unknown factors (e.g., semantic implausibility). If such factors were at work in sentences with intraposition, we should also have obtained degraded judgments for sentences with extraposition. Note furthermore that it is rather improbable that the decreased acceptability of sentences with intraposition is simply due to general problems with center-embedding. As pointed out in the discussion of Experiment 1, sentences with center-embedded structures for which the specific problems under consideration do not arise normally receive judgments in the range of 80–90%. The results obtained here for sentences with intraposition are clearly below this range, despite the fact that they are quite simple in terms of number of arguments; only a single DP argument was present in the sentences investigated here. The second finding of Experiment 2 is that animacy had a strong effect on long-distance passive clauses (intraposed infinitival clauses with a nominative DP), but marginal effects at best for the other two constructions. This confirms the suspicion that we had concerning the low acceptability of sentences with long-distance passive in the preceding experiment. There, only animate DPs were used. With regard to the grammatical status of the long-distance passive, our results allow the conclusion that sentences with long-distance passive are grammatical for native speakers of German, although they are somewhat degraded with inanimate subjects and clearly degraded with animate subjects. We attribute the degraded acceptability of this construction to processing complexities, as captured in the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis. This leaves open the question of why there is an additional drop in acceptability for sentences with animate DPs. Note first that an inspection of the corpus data collected by Wurmbrand (2003) revealed that of about 135 instances of long-distance passives, only three had an animate subject. Thus, there is a close correspondence between our experimental and Wurmbrand’s corpus data. The deeper reason for this preference of inanimate over animate subjects is not so clear. Animacy restrictions on passive formation are well known across languages of the world (Comrie, 1989); however, they go in the reverse direction. For example, in Chamorro, a sentence with an animate subject and an inanimate object cannot be passivized (Chung, 1998). Overall, there seems to be a tendency to passivize sentences with animate objects (in order to bring them into subject position) rather than sentences with inanimate objects (see also Bresnan et al., 2001; Ferreira, 1994). What we thus seem to have found is a kind of anti-animacy effect. At this point, we can only speculate about the reasons for this effect. Consider the state after the parser has encountered the subject and the infinitival verb in a sentence like dass der Schu¨ler zu entlasten versucht wurde (‘that the student to disburden tried was’). When only seeing der Schu¨ler and entlasten, the HSPM might be tempted to construe the nominative marked NP as the subject of the infinitival verb. While this is possible in principle given that the sentence might end in an active verb, a problem will arise because the verb is missing its object. The severity of this problem will depend on how optional the object is. For sentences with an inanimate subject, like dass der Traktor zu reparieren versucht wurde (‘that the tractor to repair tried was’), the same problem will not arise because for semantic reasons, it will become clear immediately that the syntactic subject must fill the object role of the infinitival verb. If an explanation along this line could be upheld, it would underscore the immediacy of parsing and interpretation. This is surely a topic which merits further research.

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6. Experiment 3 Experiment 3 does no longer include sentences exhibiting long-distance passive but instead provides a different test of the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis. As before, this experiment investigates sentences with a passivized control verb and an embedded infinitival verb. What is new is first that Experiment 3 contrasts two types of infinitival verbs, verbs taking an accusative object and verbs taking a prepositional object. Furthermore, Experiment 3 does not only look at embedded clauses (that is, V-end clauses), as all the preceding experiments have done, but also at main clauses (V-second clauses). The argument type manipulation that is new to Experiment 3 is illustrated in (32). Both sentences in (32) have an infinitival complement in intraposed position within an embedded that-clause. (32)

Infinitival clause intraposed in embedded (V-end) clause a. Es stimmt, dass gestern den neuen Plan zu verbreiten versucht wurde. it is-true that yesterday the new plan to distribute tried was ‘It is true that someone tried yesterday to distribute the new plan.’ b.

Es stimmt, dass gestern u¨ber den neuen Plan zu informieren versucht wurde. it is-true that yesterday about the new plan to inform tried was ‘It is true that someone tried yesterday to inform about the new plan.’

In (32a), the infinitival verb selects an accusative object and the sentence therefore has a bi-clausal structure. In accordance with the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis, the preceding experiments have shown that sentences of this type lead to enhanced processing difficulties for the HSPM. In sentence (32b), the infinitival verb selects a different type of argument, namely a PP-argument. It is a well-known property of the German language that passivization is possible even if a verb does not select an accusative object which could be promoted to subject in the passive voice. This gives rise to so-called impersonal passives. In contrast to sentence (32a), sentence (32b) with an infinitival clause containing a PP argument can receive a mono-clausal structure. Thus, this sentence is an impersonal passive with a passivized verb-cluster. Although such sentences might be somewhat difficult to process, the difficulties should be reduced. First, there is no clausal constituent which can be overlooked on first-pass parsing. Second, (32b) involves verb-cluster formation, but the necessary operations are easier than in the case of the long-distance passive because PP arguments are not affected by passivization. That is, function-changing operations of the sort that are necessary for an accusative object in this kind of construction do not have to be applied to the PP in (32b). The sentences in (32) are similar to all sentences used in the preceding two experiments insofar as the infinitival complement is an immediate constituent of an embedded verb-final clause. In addition to verb-final clauses, Experiment 3 will investigate main clauses, that is, verb-second clauses. The first kind of verb-second clause is illustrated in (33). (33)

Infinitival clause intraposed in main (V-second) clause a. Gestern wurde den neuen Plan zu verbreiten versucht. yesterday was the new plan to distribute tried ‘Yesterday, someone tried to distribute the new plan.’ b.

Gestern wurde u¨ber den neuen Plan zu informieren versucht. yesterday was about the new plan to inform tried ‘Yesterday, someone tried to inform about the new plan.’

In (33), the infinitival complement is in the same intraposed position as it is in (32). Sentences as in (32) and sentences as in (33) should therefore receive identical judgments. Sentences as in (33) serve mainly a control purpose. The real interest of including main clauses lies in the possibility of topicalization, as illustrated in (34). (34)

Infinitival clause fronted in main (V-second) clause a. [Den neuen Plan zu verbreiten] wurde gestern versucht. the new plan to distribute was yesterday tried ‘To distribute to the new plan, that was tried yesterday’

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b.

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¨ ber den neuen Plan zu informieren] wurde gestern versucht. [U about the new plan to inform was yesterday tried ‘To inform about the new plan, that was tried yesterday.’

In the sentences in (34), the infinitival complement has been fronted to sentence-initial position, that is, the position preceding the verb-second position (the specifier of CP). Since only one constituent can occupy this position, it is easy for the HSPM to determine that DP plus verb form an infinitival clause. This predicts that sentences with an accusative object should now be easy to process because the bi-clausal nature of the whole sentence is transparently signaled early on. For sentences with a PP-complement, in contrast, topicalization should have no effect because such sentences should be unproblematic anyway, 6.1. Method 6.1.1. Participants and procedure Forty-two students of the University of Konstanz participated in Experiment 3. The same speeded-grammaticality judgment procedure was used as in the preceding experiments. 6.1.2. Materials The sentence material for Experiment 3 consisted of 30 sentences in six versions each, according to the two factors Structure (that-clause/intraposed versus main-clause/intraposed versus main-clause/topicalized) and Argument Type (DP versus PP complement). Example sentences were already provided in (32)–(34). Sentences in the condition ‘thatclause/intraposed with DP-complement’ were adopted from the inanimate condition of Experiment 2. The two mainclause conditions were formed from the that-clause condition by dropping the matrix clause and rearranging the elements of the that-clause. Sentences with a PP-complement were derived from sentences with DP-complement by replacing the infinitival verb with a verb requiring a PP-complement, and embedding the original DP-complement in a PP appropriate for the chosen verb. As in the two preceding experiments, six sentence lists were prepared. Each list was presented together with 196 filler sentences. 6.2. Results 6.2.1. Judgments Table 3 shows the percentages of judgments ‘grammatical’ for Experiment 3. Two-way ANOVAs (3 Structures  2 Argument Types) revealed a significant main effect of Structure (F1(2,82) = 3.39, p < .05; F2(2,58) = 3.34, p < .05) but no significant main effect of Argument Type (F1(1,41) = 1.87, n.s.; F2(1,29) = 1.92, n.s.). Importantly, the interaction between Structure and Argument Type was also significant (F1(2,82) = 5.84, p < .01; F2(2,58) = 3.83, p < .05). The pattern of results is exactly as predicted at the outset. First, the two sentence structures with intraposed infinitival complement (that-clause versus main clause) did not differ from each other. This was true both for sentences with DP-argument and for sentences with PP-argument (all t-values <1). Furthermore, DP-sentences with intraposition were judged worse than PP-sentences with intraposition (72.5% versus 81%; t1 = 3.26, p < .01; t2 = 2.66, p < .01).

Table 3 Percentages of judgments ‘grammatical’ and mean reaction times (ms) to make judgments ‘grammatical’ for Experiment 3 DP

Percentage grammatical Judgment time

PP

That-clause, intraposed

Main clause, intraposed

Main clause, topicalized

That-clause, intraposed

Main clause, intraposed

Main clause, topicalized

72 (5.3) 699 (55)

73 (4.6) 712 (44)

87 (3.7) 659 (40)

82 (3.7) 640 (45)

80 (3.2) 618 (42)

80 (3.7) 664 (41)

Standard errors (by participants) are shown in parentheses.

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Topicalization of the infinitival complement had different effects on sentences with DP-argument and sentences with PP-argument: Topicalization led to improved judgments for DP-sentences but had no effect on PP-sentences (DP-sentences: 72.5% versus 87%; t1 = 4.4, p < .01; t2 = 3.69, p < .01. PP-sentences: both t-values <1). In addition, and in contrast to sentences with intraposed infinitival complement, DP-sentences were judged somewhat better than PP-sentences when the infinitival complement was topicalized, although this difference failed to reach significance (87% versus 80%; t1 = 1.84, p = .069; t2 = 1.46, p = .146). 6.3. Discussion The results of Experiment 3 provide a new kind of evidence for the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis. When the infinitival complement had an accusative object, topicalization in a main clause led to a clear improvement in acceptability in contrast to sentences in which the infinitival clause was in intraposed position in front of the embedding control verb. While topicalization is a marked operation in comparison to extraposition, the effect for the HSPM is basically the same: The infinitival clause is easily recognized, removing the processing difficulties that were seen for infinitival complements in intraposed position. In other words, when an infinitival clause is topicalized (or extraposed), the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis does no longer apply, and judgments improve. This conclusion is strengthened by the results obtained for sentences in which the infinitival verb had a PP-complement. When intraposed, a mono-clausal structure could be assigned. Judgments were therefore better than for intraposed infinitival complements with an accusative object. Furthermore, topicalization had no effect because there were no processing complexities which could be removed by topicalization. Note that Experiment 3 provides further evidence that center-embedding per se cannot be the main reason for the kind of processing complexities that were visible in this and the two preceding experiments. Were all intraposed infinitivals instances of center-embedding, we would only have expected a main effect of Structure. However, we also got a significant interaction: When the infinitival complement was intraposed, sentences with accusative object, which indeed involve center-embedding, were judged worse than sentences with PP complement. Since the reverse was true under topicalization, it can be excluded that sentences with a PP-complement are in general more acceptable than sentences with a DP complement. We therefore conclude that the results of Experiment 3 lend further support to the hypothesis that the HSPM computes a verb-cluster structure when possible, as in the sentences with PP complement. The need to switch to a bi-clausal structure, as in sentences with an accusative complement, is therefore an instance of costful reanalysis. 7. General discussion We have presented three experiments that have explored two hypotheses concerning the processing of sentences with infinitival complementation in German: The Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis and the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis. Both hypotheses could be confirmed by our experiments. The Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis was confirmed by the finding that sentences containing a clausal infinitival complement in intraposed position were difficult to process. They were not only judged worse than sentences with extraposed infinitival complement, but – as discussed in detail above – also worse than one would expect if center-embedding were the sole source of increased complexity. The Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis is supported by the finding that sentences exhibiting long-distance passive were also difficult to process despite their mono-clausal structure. Taken together, the Clause-Union Preference Hypothesis and the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis imply that there is no structure for an intraposed infinitival complement in German which really fits the needs of the HSPM. Both bi-clausal and mono-clausal intraposed structures are at a disadvantage in comparison to extraposed structures for the kind of sentences under consideration in the current paper. Given the data reported here, a base-generation account to mono-clausality effects is quite suggestive. Whether the data also help to distinguish between the ‘‘radical’’ base-generation account of verb-cluster formation as assumed here and the less radical version of VP complementation as in Wurmbrand (2007) cannot easily be decided. The reported data could also be made compatible with a VP approach. To do so, one would have to assume that the HSPM computes a structure as in (35) for the sentences under consideration. FP in (35) is meant as an abbreviation for the series of functional categories that might intervene between VP and CP.

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DP is the object of an infinitival verb V2 and has been scrambled out of VP2 to the functional field above VP1. When the HSPM processes DP, it cannot know immediately that DP has been scrambled out of an embedded VP. This becomes clear only when the infinitival verb V2 is encountered. Processing V2 does therefore not only require attaching a verb to the already existing structure. Additionally, the whole embedded VP structure has to be constructed, and a chain has to be formed including DP and its trace. These additional processing steps might be held responsible for the increased complexity of coherent intraposed constructions. In a sense, we end up with an alternative implementation of the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis. Interestingly, the two approaches make different predictions for the interpretation of sentence with indefinite objects, like Ich glaube, dass Peter ein Buch zu lesen versucht hat (‘I think that Peter a book to read tried has’). Whereas the DP ein Buch is base-generated in the object position of the verbal complex under the radical basegeneration approach, it must have been scrambled out of the lowest VP in the less radical approach by Wurmbrand. Under the assumption that scrambling of the object leads to a preference for the strong (quantificational) interpretation of indefinite DPs, as captured in the Mapping Hypothesis of Diesing (1992), this interpretation should be preferred if the VP approach is correct. In contrast, the weak, non-quantificational interpretation should be preferred under the verb-cluster approach. According to our intuitions, the weak interpretation is the preferred one, thus favoring the radical base-generation approach. However a more thorough consideration of the different kinds of evidence is needed in order to decide between the two variants of the base-generation approach. The last account that we would like to consider is the derivational account of verb-cluster formation. Under this approach, which has already been shortly mentioned when introducing the syntax of verb-cluster formation, it is assumed that verb-clusters are derived from an underlying bi-clausal structure by syntactic movement. Derivational approaches differ widely with respect to the assumed base structure (either head-final or head-initial), kind of movement (either X8-movement, XP movement or both), and assumed movement triggers (see Wurmbrand, 2006 for an overview). Since derivational approaches diverge in all these respects, it is not possible to make a general statement that encompasses them all. For reasons of space we only consider a prominent class of derivational accounts which have in common that the bi-clausal structure is seen as the primary structure from which the mono-clausal, verb-cluster structure is derived. Since mono-clausal structures therefore involve more derivational steps than bi-clausal structures, mono-clausal structures should be harder to process than bi-clausal ones. Exactly the opposite is expected under the base-generation approach of verb-cluster formation. As explained in detail above, under this approach, mono-clausal structures should be easier to process than the structurally more complex bi-clausal constructions. Experiment 3 above actually contains the data necessary to distinguish between the two kinds of approaches. Recall that in this experiment two kinds of sentences with infinitival complements of control verbs were compared. The first sentence type contained a clearly bi-clausal construction due to case restrictions, as shown schematically in (36a). The second type contained a PP argument, which is compatible with a bi-clausal but also with a mono-clausal structure. The bi-clausal structure would be similar to (36a). Note that the bi-clausal structure looks the same under both the derivational and the base-generation approach. The mono-clausal structure, in contrast, depends on the particular approach: (36b) shows a base-generated mono-clausal structure and (36c) a derived one. In (36c) mono-clausality has been achieved by movement of the PP complement out of the infinitival complement to the left and by head movement of the embedded verb with subsequent adjunction to the control verb.

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a. b. c.

. . . [CP DP-Acc V] V-control Base-generated mono-clausal: . . . PP [V V-control] Derived mono-clausal: . . .PPi [CP ti tj] [Vj V-control]

Processing a bi-clausal structure as in (36a) should lead to enhanced processing difficulties for the HSPM because an embedded infinitival clause is not signaled on its left edge and will thus be overlooked on first-pass parsing. This prediction was confirmed by Experiment 3: Sentences instantiating pattern (36a) were judged worse than sentences in which the infinitival complement was topicalized and therefore recognizable early on. This holds for both syntactic approaches to verb-cluster formation because they share structure (36a). An interesting difference emerges when we now turn to sentences with a PP argument. On the base-generation approach, a mono-clausal structure should be computed for them when the infinitival is intraposed. Since a basegenerated mono-clausal structure does not pose the kinds of problems posed by a bi-clausal structure, intraposed PP sentences are predicted to be easier than intraposed DP sentences. This is what was found in Experiment 3. On the derivational approach, in contrast, a mono-clausal structure is in fact syntactically more complex than a bi-clausal one. The option of assigning a mono-clausal structure should therefore be of no help for the parser. Thus, PP sentences with infinitival clause are predicted to be at least as complex as corresponding DP sentences. This prediction was not confirmed in Experiment 3. As a final question, we may ask why the grammar tolerates intraposed infinitival clauses at all, given that they are problematic from the HSPM’s point of view, and that extraposition provides a viable alternative? We believe that the key to answer this question lies in the OV-nature of German. Infinitival clauses selected by a control verb are objects, and as such they are licensed to occur left to their selected verb, that is, in intraposed position. It would of course be possible to ban them from this position, but to do so would need an explicit statement to this effect, and this would lead to a more complicated grammar. A negative statement of this kind actually seems to exist in the grammar of German: Finite complement clauses are basically forbidden in intraposed position. For infinitival clauses, the grammar has taken a different way by making available the option of verb-cluster formation. This is not a viable option for finite clauses. By providing this option, a major drawback of intraposed infinitival clauses – namely bi-clausality – has been removed. Of course, verb-cluster formation introduces complexities of its own. While these were rather severe for the long-distance passive construction that was investigated in the current paper, passivization itself probably magnified the complexity due to the necessary argument-changing operations. In sum, we hypothesize that intraposed infinitivals are allowed by the grammar of German for the simple reason that German is an OV language. They are complex even if given a mono-clausal structure, but this complexity is not high enough to prevent their use altogether (although they are clearly a small minority in comparison to extraposed structures, as shown by corpus data in Schmid et al., 2005). Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 471, Project D2). Thanks are due to the organizers and the audience of the workshop Experimental evidence for minimal structure (Siegen, Germany, February 28–March 2, 2007), as well as our colleagues in the SFB and two anonymous reviewers for lively discussions and helpful comments. References Bader, M., Bayer, J., 2006. Case and Linking in Language Comprehension – Evidence from German. Springer, Heidelberg. Bader, M., Ha¨ussler, J., 2005. World-knowledge and frequency in resolving number ambiguities. Poster presented at 11th Annual Conference on Architecture and Mechanisms for Language Processing, University of Ghent, Belgium. Bader, M., Lasser, I., 1994. German verb-final clauses and sentence processing: evidence for immediate attachment. In: Clifton, Jr., C., Frazier, L., Rayner, K. (Eds.), Perspectives on Sentence Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 225–242. Bader, M., Schmid, T., 2006. An OT-analysis of do-support in Modern German. Manuscript, Rutgers Optimality Archive, Nr. 837-0606. Bader, M., Schmid, T. Verb clusters in Colloquial German. Ms, submitted for publication. Bader, M., Bayer, J., Ha¨ussler, J., 2003. Explorations of center embedding and missing VPs. Poster presented at 16th CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

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