Processing as a Source of Accessibility Effects on Variation

T. Florian Jaeger, Thomas Wasow
2014 Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society  
0. Introduction * English restrictive non-subject-extracted relative clauses (i.e. relative clauses in which the extracted element is not the subject of the relative clause; henceforth NSRCs) exhibit variation in that the relativizer (here that) can be omitted: 1 (1) This is the first president i (that) nobody voted for _ i . A variety of factors are known to influence relativizer likelihood (see, inter alia, Biber et al. 1999; Fox and Thompson to appear; Tagliamonte, Smith, and Lawrence 2005;
more » ... emperley 2003; Tottie 1995) . We present new evidence that the conceptual accessibility (Bock and Warren 1985:50) of an NSRC's subject affects relativizer likelihood: The more accessible the referent of a NSRC's subject is, the less likely the NSRC is to have a relativizer. We link this finding to research on the production and comprehension of relative clauses, and so integrate the observed accessibility effect into a uniform processing account of relativizer variation (Race and MacDonald 2003; . In Section 1, we show that relativizer omission is sensitive to the derived accessibility (Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000) of the NSRC's subject -that is, the subject referent's salience/givenness in discourse. In Section 2, we outline a processing-based account of the observed effects. In Section 3, we show that relativizer variation is also affected by the inherent accessibility of the NSRC's
doi:10.3765/bls.v31i1.889 fatcat:6tbumuntbfahdbbxgtc6zkbhla