Elaine J. Francis is a professor in the Department of English at Purdue University, where she has been teaching linguistics and directing the Experimental Linguistics Lab since 2003. She completed her PhD in linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1999 and taught for three years in the Department of English at the University of Hong Kong. In her research, she investigates syntactic, discourse, and processing-based factors that affect the realization of syntactic alternations in English and Cantonese.

The greatest strength of Francis' book lies in the author's meticulous and nuanced interpretations of a broad range of experimental results. These discussions not only illustrate the value of good scientific practice, but they also highlight how difficult it is to derive conclusive interpretations about the factors that give rise to acceptability judgments.

• General preface Acknowledgments List of figures List of abbreviations 1: The problem of gradient acceptability 2: Theories of grammatical knowledge in relation to formal syntactic and non-syntactic explanations 3: On distinguishing formal syntactic constraints from other aspects of linguistic knowledge 4: On distinguishing formal syntactic constraints from processing constraints 5: On the relationship between corpus frequency and acceptability 6: Relative clause extraposition and PP extraposition in English and German 7: Resumptive pronouns in Hebrew, English, and Cantonese relative clauses 8: Gradient acceptability, methodological diversity, and theoretical interpretation Glossary References Index

Elaine J. Francis is a professor in the Department of English at Purdue University, where she has been teaching linguistics and directing the Experimental Linguistics Lab since 2003. She completed her PhD in linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1999 and taught for three years in the Department of English at the University of Hong Kong. In her research, she investigates syntactic, discourse, and processing-based factors that affect the realization of syntactic alternations in English and Cantonese.

The greatest strength of Francis' book lies in the author's meticulous and nuanced interpretations of a broad range of experimental results. These discussions not only illustrate the value of good scientific practice, but they also highlight how difficult it is to derive conclusive interpretations about the factors that give rise to acceptability judgments.

• General preface Acknowledgments List of figures List of abbreviations 1: The problem of gradient acceptability 2: Theories of grammatical knowledge in relation to formal syntactic and non-syntactic explanations 3: On distinguishing formal syntactic constraints from other aspects of linguistic knowledge 4: On distinguishing formal syntactic constraints from processing constraints 5: On the relationship between corpus frequency and acceptability 6: Relative clause extraposition and PP extraposition in English and German 7: Resumptive pronouns in Hebrew, English, and Cantonese relative clauses 8: Gradient acceptability, methodological diversity, and theoretical interpretation Glossary References Index

Elaine J. Francis is a professor in the Department of English at Purdue University, where she has been teaching linguistics and directing the Experimental Linguistics Lab since 2003. She completed her PhD in linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1999 and taught for three years in the Department of English at the University of Hong Kong. In her research, she investigates syntactic, discourse, and processing-based factors that affect the realization of syntactic alternations in English and Cantonese.

The greatest strength of Francis' book lies in the author's meticulous and nuanced interpretations of a broad range of experimental results. These discussions not only illustrate the value of good scientific practice, but they also highlight how difficult it is to derive conclusive interpretations about the factors that give rise to acceptability judgments.

• General preface Acknowledgments List of figures List of abbreviations 1: The problem of gradient acceptability 2: Theories of grammatical knowledge in relation to formal syntactic and non-syntactic explanations 3: On distinguishing formal syntactic constraints from other aspects of linguistic knowledge 4: On distinguishing formal syntactic constraints from processing constraints 5: On the relationship between corpus frequency and acceptability 6: Relative clause extraposition and PP extraposition in English and German 7: Resumptive pronouns in Hebrew, English, and Cantonese relative clauses 8: Gradient acceptability, methodological diversity, and theoretical interpretation Glossary References Index