Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Abstract

This study examined word order preferences as a function of phrasal length in Basque. Basque is an OV-language with flexible sentence word order and rich verb agreement. Contrary to the universal short-before-long preference predicted by availability models, Hawkins has argued that short-before-long orders are preferred in VO-languages such as English, whereas long-beforeshort orders are preferred in OV-languages such as Japanese (Hawkins, 2004). However, it is unclear how length affects word order preferences when an OV-language has rich verb agreement and allows postverbal arguments. We found a general long-before-short preference, and a tendency to place the verb in a sentence-medial position when one constituent is long. We argue that since agreement morphology signals the thematic role and case of surrounding phrases, it contributes to speeding up sentence processing. We conclude that morphologically rich languages employ both general adjacency mechanisms and language-specific resources to enhance language efficiency.

Eye-tracking the effect of word order in sentence comprehension in aphasia: evidence from Basque, a free word order ergative language

“…We wanted to see whether PWA process verb agreement morphology and, if so, whether this overwrites the impact of word order in the comprehension deficits. Recall that in Basque the inflected verb agrees in case, number and person with all arguments of the sentence, and therefore, the listener may disentangle thematic roles resorting to agreement morphology, with the support of the visual stimuli, as soon as the verb and the first DP are presented (see Ros, Santesteban, Fukumura, & Laka, 2015). In such a case, incremental thematic role assignment is expected from the offset of the first DP, without the need to process the subsequent case markers affixed to the second argument (as shown in Kamide, Scheepers, et al, 2003;Knoeferle et al, 2005 with NBD participants).…”

Cognitive loads and time courses related to word order preference in Kaqchikel sentence production: an NIRS and eye-tracking study

“…In contrast, efficiency-based theories focus more on ease of comprehension. See Ros, Santesteban, Fukumura, and Laka (2015) for a review. See also Koizumi et al (2014) for the related notions of the universal cognitive view vs. the individual grammar view.…”

El carácter sintético de la lengua latina y su legado cultural

“…De los estudios hechos se desprende, asimismo, que la 'facilidad de procesamiento' no es un término absoluto e independiente, sino que está ligado a otras tendencias de las lenguas. Por ejemplo, la tendencia a anteponer los elementos cortos frente a los largos, constatable en lenguas como el inglés y, en general, las de orden VO, no opera del mismo modo en las lenguas OV como japonés o coreano (Yamashita, Chang, 2001), o vasco (Ros et al, 2015) 10 .…”