A statistical model of competing motivations affecting relative clause extraposition in German

Strunk, Jan

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198709848.003.0006

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Using corpus data from Heavy NP Shift and the prepositional/ double-object alternation in English, he found that predictions based on length in words and predictions based on number of syntactic nodes dominated were so highly correlated as to be virtually indistinguishable. Some subsequent studies have shown that structural embedding can have subtle but independent eff ects (Strunk, 2014 ;Wasow & Arnold, 2005 ). Here, though, we follow the majority of current studies and operationalize grammatical weight as phrase length in words.…”

Section: Gr Ammatical Weight Discourse Factors and Sentence Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, diff erent studies have used diff erent methods of measuring such eff ects. This section considers which measures of grammatical weight are most useful for predicting phrasal ordering preferences, with an emphasis on RCE in English (Francis, 2010 ;Francis & Michaelis, 2014 ) and German (Konieczny, 2000 ;Strunk, 2014 ;Uszkoreit et al, 1998 ). First, it should be noted that there are a few diff erent ways in which weight can be measured, including syllables, words, and syntactic nodes.…”

Section: Gr Ammatical Weight Discourse Factors and Sentence Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to these weight-based and complexity-based factors, he found that discourse-related factors, including defi niteness of the antecedent NP (RCE was more likely with indefi nite NPs) and restrictiveness of the RC (RCE was slightly more likely with restrictive RCs), also aff ected writers' structural choices. Francis and Michaelis ( 2014 ) used a similar method to Strunk ( 2014 ) to examine factors aff ecting the use of RCE in English. A logistic regression analysis showed a strong preference for RCE when the RC was at least fi ve times longer than the VP, and a strong preference for non-RCE when the RC was the same length as or shorter than the VP.…”

Section: Gr Ammatical Weight Discourse Factors and Sentence Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most relevant here are previous results for RCE, to which we now turn. Strunk ( 2014 ) used a logistic regression model to investigate thirty-two factors hypothesized to aff ect writers' choice of RCE or non-RCE structure in the Tübingen Treebank of Written German. Of these, eighteen were signifi cant predictors of RCE.…”

Section: Ph R a S E L E N G T H A N D D I S C O U R S E Fa C To R S Imentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Francis and Michaelis ( 2014 ) used a similar method to Strunk ( 2014 ) to examine factors aff ecting the use of RCE in English. A logistic regression analysis showed a strong preference for RCE when the RC was at least fi ve times longer than the VP, and a strong preference for non-RCE when the RC was the same length as or shorter than the VP.…”

Section: Ph R a S E L E N G T H A N D D I S C O U R S E Fa C To R S Imentioning

confidence: 99%

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When relative clause extraposition is the right choice, it’s easier

Francis

Michaelis

2016

Lang. cogn.

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In one type of Relative Clause Extraposition (RCE) in English, a subject-modifying relative clause occurs in a displaced position following the matrix VP, as in: Some options were considered that allow for more flexibility. Although RCE incurs a discontinuous dependency and is relatively infrequent in discourse, previous corpus and acceptability judgment studies have shown that speakers prefer RCE over adjacent ordering when the RC is long in relation to the VP, the subject NP is indefinite, and the main verb is passive/presentative (Francis, 2010; Francis & Michaelis, 2014; Walker, 2013). The current study is the first to relate these conditional preferences to online measures of production. For a spoken production task that required speakers to construct sentences based on visual cues, results showed that the same factors that modulate choice of structure – VP length, RC length, and definiteness of the subject NP – also modulate voice initiation time. That is, when the sentential context warrants a particular structure, that structure becomes easier to produce. Following the approach of MacDonald (2013), we explain these findings in terms of two production biases, one of which favors early placement of shorter, more accessible phrases and the other of which promotes rapid retrieval from memory of the most frequently used subtypes of a construction.

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Section: Gr Ammatical Weight Discourse Factors and Sentence Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Gr Ammatical Weight Discourse Factors and Sentence Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Gr Ammatical Weight Discourse Factors and Sentence Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ph R a S E L E N G T H A N D D I S C O U R S E Fa C To R S Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ph R a S E L E N G T H A N D D I S C O U R S E Fa C To R S Imentioning

confidence: 99%

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When relative clause extraposition is the right choice, it’s easier

Francis

Michaelis

2016

Lang. cogn.

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Antilocality effect without head-final dependencies.

Schwab¹,

Xiang²,

Liu³

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Antilocality effects provide strong evidence for expectation-based sentence parsing models. Previous discussion of the antilocality effect, however, largely focused on the argument-verb dependencies in verb-final constructions, for which a memory retrieval-based account has been argued to be equally adequate. To test whether the principles of expectation/memory-based accounts hold for a wider range of dependencies, we report on two self-paced reading experiments that compared two different determiners in German: the morphologically complex determiner derjenige 'the-jenig,' which obligatorily requires a relative clause, and the bare determiner der 'the,' which does not trigger such expectations. The first experiment did not show the expected antilocality effect, but the reliability of our results was restricted by the experiment's low statistical power. In a large-scale second experiment we addressed confounds in the design of Experiment 1 and found evidence for an antilocality effect with the complex determiner. As the antilocality effect found in our study does not involve argument-verb dependencies, the memory-based account cannot be extended to the current case. Thus, our findings provide novel empirical support for the expectation-based antilocality effect. At the same time, the experiment attests to a processing cost in later sentence regions, hinting that memory-and expectation-based effects can co-occur within the same structure.

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Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory

Francis¹

2021

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In Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory, Elaine J. Francis examines a challenging problem at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and the psychology of language: the problem of interpreting gradient judgments of sentence acceptability in relation to theories of grammatical knowledge. This problem is important because acceptability judgments constitute the primary source of data on which such theories have been built, despite being susceptible to various extra-grammatical factors. Through a review of experimental and corpus-based research on a variety of syntactic phenomena and an in-depth examination of two case studies, Francis argues for two main positions. The first is that converging evidence from online comprehension tasks, elicited production tasks, and corpora of naturally occurring discourse can help determine the sources of variation in acceptability judgments and narrow down the range of plausible theoretical interpretations. The second is that the interpretation of judgment data depends crucially on one’s theoretical commitments and assumptions, especially with respect to the nature of the syntax–semantics interface and the choice of either a categorical or a gradient notion of grammaticality. The theoretical frameworks considered in this book include derivational theories (e.g. Minimalism, Principles and Parameters), constraint-based theories (e.g. Sign-Based Construction Grammar, Simpler Syntax), competition-based theories (e.g. Stochastic Optimality Theory, Decathlon Model), and usage-based approaches. While showing that acceptability judgment data are typically compatible with the assumptions of various theoretical frameworks, Francis argues that some gradient phenomena are best captured within frameworks that permit soft constraints—non-categorical grammatical constraints that encode the conventional preferences of language users.

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A statistical model of competing motivations affecting relative clause extraposition in German

Cited by 17 publications

References 60 publications

When relative clause extraposition is the right choice, it’s easier

When relative clause extraposition is the right choice, it’s easier

Antilocality effect without head-final dependencies.

Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory

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