Frozen by context: Pragmatic factors of syntactic freezing

Abstract

Syntactic freezing has mainly been approached from a structural point of view, recently though, more cognitive approaches in terms of processing costs have been proposed. One such processing account is the additive account. According to this approach, the freezing effect is best explained as an additive effect of two syntactic processes coming together, rather than being a phenomenon on its own. Another processing account argues that the freezing effect is the result of a prosodic garden path according to which extraction can only take place from a prosodically focused constituent. The current study provides empirical evidence for a less discussed factor contributing to the freezing effect, namely a pragmatic one. The pragmatic account requires frozen sentences to have contextually given referents. If no such referent is present, the sentence becomes less acceptable. The need for such a referent comes from the non- default word order associated with frozen sentences, which often highlights/focuses a certain constituent. Several experiments were run to test the pragmatic account. Based on the results it was concluded that pragmatic factors play a significant role in explaining the apparent freezing effects. Other factors however, seem to contribute to this effect as well since this effect cannot be fully explained in terms of pragmatic factors solely.