The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian

Abstract

A rich variety of factors have been proposed as possible determinants of differences in the ease of processing of relative clauses. These determinants include the grammatical role of the head, the shape of surface order configurations the occurence of interruptions of the main clause, and the presence or absence of morphological cues. The strict SVO word order of English makes it so that subject-modifying relatives necessarily interrupt the main clause, thus confounding the effects of role and interruption determinants. Hungarian, with its variable word order, allows us to achieve a somewhat better understanding of the separate effects of roles, configurations, interruptions, and morphological cues. A study using 144 different restrictive relative clause patterns in Hungarian provided evidence for the importance of three determinants of relative clause processing. First, the importance of perspective maintenance was indicated by the fact that SS sentences were the easiest to process and that SO were the most difficult. Second, the extreme difficulty subjects had in processing NNV sentences with a relative clause modifying the second noun indicated the importance of limits on fragment construction of chunks in a bottom-up parsing process. The use of antecedent tagging to mark extraposed relatives in SOV languages with variable order such as Hungarian and Georgian also indicated the importance of limits on fragment construction. Third, the conflict between focusing in the relative clause and focusing in the main clause indicated the importance of focus maintenance. A variety of other proposed determinants were found to be of little importance in accounting for the processing of relative clauses in Hungarian.