Abstract
The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing. We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexity metric, one that reflects a minimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender’s degree of uncertainty at each point in a sentence. We use this idea to quantify the intuition that people do comprehension work as they incrementally resolve ambiguity, word by word. We find that downward changes to this quantitative measure of uncertainty derive observed processing contrasts between Subject- and Object-extracted relative clauses. This demonstrates that the complexity metric, in conjunction with a minimalist grammar and corpus-based weights, accounts for the widely-observed Subject Advantage.
Highlights
Relative clauses present linguists with a variety of puzzles
Why are some relative clauses easier to understand than others? Can asymmetries in processing be related to their syntactic structure and, if so, how? This paper proposes a solution to these puzzles
Because the fragments of Chinese, Japanese and Korean are expressed as Minimalist Grammars (MGs), their derivations may be viewed as having been generated by a context-free phrase structure grammar (CFG)
Summary
Relative clauses present linguists with a variety of puzzles. Two in particular are fundamental in the sense that any solution to them would carry implications for syntax, typology and psycholinguistics. The proposed theory uses syntactic alternatives that are logically entailed by the grammar to derive numerical predictions of processing difficulty at specific words For such constructions, there is a fairly strong consensus in the generative literature that some kind of extraction is implicated in the syntactic derivation (see Huang et al 2009 for Chinese, Whitman 2012 for Japanese and Han and Kim 2004 for Korean). This weighting makes it possible to quantify sentence-medial ambiguity as the entropy of the remainder set. Our grammars and corpus data are included as Electronic Supplementary Material, and our software is freely available
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