Superiority Effects in Russian, Polish, and Czech: Judgments and Grammar"
Roland Meyer · 2004
Constraints on the surface linear order of wiz phrases (superiority effects) are certainly important for the syntactic analysis of wh movement in Slavic. but also very controversial empirically. This paper reports the results of a series Magnitude Estimation studies (cf. Bard et al. 1996) concerning the linguistic acceptability of various wh orders in Russian. Polish, and Czech. In order to determine the linguistic status of the fine-grained differences elicited in the experimental studies, they are evaluated against evidence from large text corpora. Some of the effects turn out to be stable and language-specific, which makes them bad candidates for performance phenomena or functional preferences. The outcome of the discussion is a scalar view of the strength of superiority effects, with different potential cut-off points between grammaticality and ungrammaticality among the Slavic languages.