People often use personal stories to support and defend their views. But can a personal story be evidence? A story tells us that a certain event can happen and has already happened to someone, but it may not always help us understand what caused the event or predict how likely that event is to happen again in the future. Moreover, people confabulate. That is, when they tell stories about their past, they are likely to distort reality in some way. When people who lack access to what motivated past behaviour are asked why they made a choice, they tend to offer plausible considerations in support of that choice, even if those considerations could not have played a motivating role in bringing about their behaviour. When people experience impairments in autobiographical memory, they tend to fill the gaps in their own story by reconstructing significant events to match their interests, values, and conception of themselves. This means that people often offer a curated version of the events they describe. In this paper, we argue that the pervasiveness of confabulation does not rule out that personal stories can be used as evidence but invites us to reflect carefully about what they are evidence of. And this is especially important in the context of digital storytelling, because stories shared on online platforms can exert even greater influence on what people think and do.

The syntax literature has overwhelmingly adopted the view that Condition C reconstruction takes place in wh-chains for R-expressions contained within arguments, but not within adjuncts of fronted wh-phrases. At the same time, this empirical picture has been questioned by various authors. We undertake a series of grammaticality surveys using Amazon Mechanical Turk in an attempt to clarify the empirical picture regarding reconstruction for Binding Condition C. We find absolutely no evidence of an argument–adjunct distinction in reconstruction for Binding Condition C. Neither arguments nor adjuncts reconstruct for Condition C. We suggest that those speakers who report such a contrast (linguists, primarily) are following a pragmatic bias, and not Condition C. While we do not find reconstruction of dependents of fronted NPs for Binding Condition C, we do find reconstruction of fronted PPs. That is, the NP complement of a fronted P must reconstruct for Binding Condition C. The literature also finds reconstruction of NP complements of verbs and adjectives. This means that fronted Ns are special in not requiring reconstruction of their arguments and adjuncts. We suggest that, syntactically, arguments of Ns are treated as adjuncts: semantic arguments simply adjoin in the same manner as true adjuncts. Syntactic adjuncts can be left out of lower copies in chains, something that we suggest follows from a left-to-right syntactic derivation plus an economy condition on copying.