Exploring similarities in 'seem' constructions with experiencers in English and Spanish
- 1 March 2023
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Project MUSE in Language
- Vol. 99 (1), e18-e34
- https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2023.0002
Abstract
Sentences that contain the verb 'seem', an experiencer, and an embedded infinitival phrase (e.g. Jill seems to me to be smart) have traditionally been considered acceptable in English, but not in Spanish. However, a corpus analysis reveals that such sentences are produced in both languages, most commonly with the embedded infinitives 'be' and 'have'. Acceptability judgment tasks completed by fifty English speakers and fifty Spanish speakers further reveal that the embedded verbs 'be' and 'have' render this sentence structure most acceptable in both languages, and that the degree of contextual subjectivity in a sentence significantly affects acceptability. This study demonstrates how multiple data types can be used to uncover novel crosslinguistic patterns that have gone unnoticed in previous research that was based primarily on informal introspective judgments.*Keywords
This publication has 7 references indexed in Scilit:
- The effect of three basic task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment tasksGlossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 2020
- On the learnability of implicit argumentsPublished by John Benjamins Publishing Company ,2019
- Acceptability judgments and grammaticality, prospects and challengesPublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,2018
- On the usefulness of formal judgment tasks in syntax and in second-language research: The case of resumptive pronouns in English, Turkish, and Mandarin ChineseLinguistics, 2016
- A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001–2010Lingua, 2013
- Quantitative methods in syntax/semantics research: A response to Sprouse and Almeida (2013)Language and Cognitive Processes, 2013
- Subject-to-subject raising and the syntax of tense in L2 Spanish: A Full Access approachBilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2012