Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Frequency plays a central role in human cognition, and in lan-guage processing in particular. There is growing evidence thatacceptability judgements are shaped by the statistics of theinput. In this paper, we focus on a type of constraint opera-tive in long-distance dependencies (e.g. wh-questions, relativeclauses, topicalizations, etc.) which has been claimed to re-sult from verb subcategorization frequency effects. We takea closer look at this hypothesis, and conclude that it does notaccount for the sentence acceptability contrasts. Rather, theevidence we find suggests that the acceptability of these depen-dencies hinges on clause-level semantic-pragmatic factors.