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A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives

Paper · 2017 · Nick G. Riches and Maria Garraffa

Summary

The paper asks why "intervention" sentences are hard to understand. In these sentences a moved phrase crosses another phrase of the same kind, as in a which-question with two full noun phrases. The dominant answer, Relativised Minimality (RM), says the two NPs clash because their features overlap. The authors test a discourse alternative. Subjects tend to be topics and are often pronouns, so configurations with two lexically-restricted NPs are seldom produced, and rarity alone might make them hard.

The study has two parts. First, a corpus study (including COCA) measured how far discourse factors shape the frequencies of question types. Second, a picture-based comprehension study with young children used individual differences as a stand-in for input exposure.

The corpus counts showed that discourse largely drives question frequencies and that intervention questions are almost absent from the input. However, the behavioural data showed no link between frequency and processing, and the results fit a maturational RM account better. The work shows what evidence a usage-based discourse account would still need.

Key points

  • The design is mixed: a corpus frequency analysis (COCA) plus a behavioural comprehension experiment with children (mean age 5;2), using pictures and standard grammar testing (TROG-2 is listed among the abbreviations).
  • Question frequencies are shaped mainly by discourse factors, despite some evidence of avoidance, and intervention questions are vanishingly rare in input.
  • On intervention items, the children scored only about 6% above chance. Friedmann et al.'s younger children (4;6) scored 32% above chance, possibly because that study used a more child-friendly act-out method.
  • Individual differences in the normal range did not systematically predict performance on intervention items. This contrasts with clinical studies, which find larger impaired-versus-typical gaps on these structures.
  • Avoidance (e.g., switching to passive relatives) is much weaker in naturalistic data than in elicitation experiments, which interference accounts still need to explain.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Frequency should be counted at the level of cues inside slots (pronoun vs. full NP, animacy, givenness), not just per construction, because rarity often hides in slot-filler combinations.
  • I2. Two theories that predict the same difficulty can be separated by finding conditions where only one predicts a difference, such as pronouns matched for animacy but differing in frequency.
  • I3. Discourse status pushes specific slots toward pronouns: the embedded subject of an object relative faces a double push to refer to something already given.
  • I4. The link between exposure and difficulty may only appear once frequency crosses a threshold, rather than rising linearly.
  • I5. Speakers choose forms by discourse status (pronouns for given referents, full NPs for new ones, topics as subjects), which naturally avoids hard intervention configurations.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Evaluation sets for the parser and frame extractor could be stratified by slot-filler type, so rare "two full NPs in a dependency" cases are scored separately instead of being averaged away.
  • I2 (learn): Negative controls could be built the same way: minimal pairs where a frequency-driven shortcut and a structural rule disagree, revealing which one a model actually relies on.
  • I3 (frames): Coreference could use this as a prior, so that a pronoun in such a slot is preferentially linked to a topical, already-mentioned entity.
  • I4 (learn): Silver data for rare constructions could be deliberately oversampled until it passes a minimum count, instead of expecting gains proportional to added data.
  • I5 (back): The generator could apply these choices when turning the meaning graph into text, producing output that is easier to read and closer to natural usage.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Heriot-Watt UniversityEdinburgh · United Kingdom10 works · 5,081 citations🎓Newcastle UniversityNewcastle upon Tyne · United Kingdom8 works · 588 citations

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 worksNeuroscience · 95 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 95 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Discourse analysis · 394 works

Cite

Cite as Nick G. Riches and Maria Garraffa. 2017. A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.100

@article{riches2017discourse,
  title = {{A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives}},
  author = {Nick G. Riches and Maria Garraffa},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.100},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.100}
}

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  37. How to cite this article: Riches, Nick G. and Maria Garraffa. 2017. A discourse account of intervention phenomena: An investigation of interrogatives. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 74. 1–20, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ gjgl.100 ↗
  38. Published: 25 August 2017 find
  39. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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