Word and construction probabilities explain the acceptability of certain long-distance dependency structures

The factors that affect the acceptability of long-distance extractions have long been debated, with multiple accounts proposed. Liu et al. (2022) proposed a succinct probability-based account of a sub-class of these kinds of materials, wh-questions with long-distance dependencies across sentence-complement verbs (e.g., “What did Mary whine that John bought?”). The explanation that they proposed was that the acceptability of such sentences depends on the probability of the verb-frame of the intermediate verb (e.g., “whine that”). In the current work, we evaluate some potentially simpler probability-based accounts on Liu et al.'s original data set, and show how an alternative (but also probability-based) approach accounts for the data better. We replicate their experiment and conduct the same analysis on the new dataset, finding the same results. Finally, we apply the same analysis to wh-questions with predicate adjectives (e.g., “What was Mary glad that John bought?”), and again find similar results. We conclude that the acceptability of such constructions is higher the more probable the words and constructions that make up the sentence are.