KROLL DEFENDS SECOND QUALIFYING PAPER

Congratulations to Margaret Kroll, who successfully defended her second Qualifying Paper on April 28. The paper, entitled “Is working memory sensitive to at-issueness? Experimental evidence from at-issue appositives”, examines a curious asymmetry between how long restrictive relative clauses and long appositive relative clauses differentially impact sentence complexity. In a series of acceptability judgment studies, she demonstrates that it is not due to the variable relationship of the appositive relative clause to the discourse, contra existing proposals in the literature. Her committee consisted of Adrian Brasoveanu, Donka Farkas and Matt Wagers (chair).