Freezing: Between grammar and processing

We argue in this paper that 'freezing' phenomena do not reflect grammatical constraints, but rather processing complexity. We extend this result to the radical hypothesis that in general, judgments of unacceptability that have been taken in the literature as evidence for grammatical constraints on otherwise well-formed configurations are in fact the consequence of processing complexity and context effects. After briefly reviewing the notion of freezing, we look at the kind of evidence that has been used to argue for freezing constraints. Then we review experimental evidence that suggests that the unacceptability of certain freezing configurations is actually due to the processing effects of interacting extraction chains, and we argue that certain freezing effects are due to discourse processing factors such as information structure. We conclude with a summary and a statement of our radical hypothesis as a basis for future research.