Abstract
Object relatives (ORs) have been reported to cause heavier processing loads than subject relatives (SRs) in both pre- and postnominal position (prenominal relatives: Miyamoto & Nakamura 2003, Kwon 2008, Ueno & Garnsey 2008; postnominal relatives: King & Just 1991, King & Kutas 1995, Traxler et al. 2002). In this article, we report the results of two eye-tracking studies of Korean prenominal relative clauses that confirm a processing advantage for subject relatives both with and without supporting context. These results are shown to be compatible with accounts involving the accessibility hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977), phrase-structural complexity (O’Grady 1997), and probabilistic structural disambiguation (Mitchell et al. 1995, Hale 2006), partially compatible with similarity-based interference (Gordon et al. 2001), but incompatible with linear/temporal analyses of filler-gap dependencies (Gibson 1998, 2000, Lewis & Vasishth 2005, Lewis et al. 2006).
Highlights
The patterning of relative clauses (RCs) across languages displays one of the most robust and interesting generalizations in crosslinguistic research
For scrambled object head-noun sentences, there was a significant effect of gap type only for the constituent ‘senator-ACC’, where the object gap condition took longer to read than the subject gap condition (F1(1,41) = 4.34, MSE = 16,522, p < 0.05; F2(1,35) = 5.60, MSE = 9,711, p < 0.05)
Recall that the linear- and temporal-distance accounts predict a crossover interaction of gap type and context: when there was preceding discourse context, subject relative (SR) were either predicted to take longer to read than Object relatives (ORs), or no processing asymmetry at all was predicted; when there was no preceding discourse, ORs were predicted to take longer to read than SRs due to greater structural ambiguity (Ishizuka et al 2006)
Summary
The patterning of relative clauses (RCs) across languages displays one of the most robust and interesting generalizations in crosslinguistic research. (1) subject > direct object > indirect object > oblique. If a language can relativize obliques, it can relativize direct and indirect objects and subjects. If a language can relativize objects, it can relativize subjects, but not necessarily obliques. This pattern of crosslinguistic grammaticality is mirrored in English by the relative frequency with which different types of RCs are used: the higher the grammatical position in the hierarchy, the greater the frequency with which RCs are formed on that position (Keenan 1975, Gordon & Hendrick 2005; cf Fox 1987, Fox & Thompson 1990).
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