The learnability of bridge effects

Abstract

The distinction between bridge verbs, which allow long-distance questions out of their CP complement, and non-bridge verbs, which do not, is found in a range of languages. In the previous literature, this distinction has been variably attributed to the lexical semantic/discourse properties of the CP-embedding verbs, or the syntactic positioning of the dependent CP. In this study, we provide evidence for an alternative, learning-based account, whereby positive input evidence is needed for children to acquire the possibility of wh -dependencies across a CP-embedding verb, and to further generalize this property to all such verbs. We examine the bridge/non-bridge distinction in English and Mandarin, with a corpus analysis of child-directed speech and experimental evidence provided for each language. We demonstrate that while English shows a clear bridge/non-bridge distinction, Mandarin CP-embedding verbs are all bridge verbs for both argument and adjunct wh -dependencies. These findings are predicted by a difference in the structure of the input data available to English versus Mandarin children as they acquire long-distance wh -dependencies, along with the proposed learning-based account of the bridge effect.