Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between headedness and language processing and considers two strategies that potentially ease language comprehension and production. Both strategies allow a language to minimize the number of arguments in a given clause, either by reducing the number of overtly expressed arguments or by reducing the number of structurally required arguments. The first strategy consists of minimizing the number of overtly expressed arguments by using more pro-drop for two-place predicates (Pro-drop bias). According to the second strategy, a language gives preference to one-place predicates over two-place predicates, thus minimizing the number of structural arguments (Intransitive bias). In order to investigate these strategies, we conducted a series of comparative corpus studies of SVO and SOV languages. Study 1 examined written texts of various genres and children's utterances in English and Japanese, while Study 2 examined narrative stories in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish. The results for these studies showed that pro-drop was uniformly more common with two-place predicates than with one-place predicates, regardless of the OV/VO distinction. Thus the Pro-drop bias emerges as a universal economy principle for making utterances shorter. On the other hand, SOV languages showed a much stronger Intransitive bias than SVO languages. This finding suggests that SOV word order with all the constituents explicitly expressed is potentially harder to process; the dominance of one-place predicates is therefore a compensatory strategy in order to reduce the number of preverbal arguments. The overall pattern of results suggests that human languages utilize both general (Pro-drop bias) and headedness-order-specific (Intransitive bias) strategies to facilitate processing. The results on headedness-order-specific strategies are consistent with other researchers' findings on differential processing in head-final and non-head-final languages, for example, Yamashita & Chang's (2001) ‘long-before-short’ parameterization.
Highlights
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MARIA POLINSKY Harvard University (Received 28 March 2008; revised 2 April 2009) This paper examines the relationship between headedness and language processing and considers two strategies that potentially ease language comprehension and production
Sentences like He gave to the girl [a box of candy he got in New York while visiting his parents for ten days around Christmas and New Year’s] would be preferred to sentences like He gave [the box of candy he got in New York while visiting his parents for ten days around Christmas and New Year’s] to the girl
Summary
Yamashita & Chang argued that since Japanese is a verb-final free word order language, it allows speakers to use word order to mark the conceptual saliency of long and complex phrases by fronting them, whereas English has a strict word order and puts a higher value on the syntactic constraint of fronting shorter and more readily accessible phrases This paper extends this line of research by examining what types of strategies are used to ease the processing load associated with languages of different word orders. Based on the Intransitive bias hypothesis, we predict that SOV languages reduce processing load by reducing the number of preverbal arguments, and should utilize more one-place predicates than SVO languages do. UVWX=&Y" Z[\: tatoeba suzukinaikaku-to onajiyouni takai shijiritsu-no for.example Suzuki.ministry-with same.as high support.rate-GEN
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