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

Abstract

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.

Signal Smoothing and Syntactic Choices: A Critical Reflection on the UID Hypothesis

“…Data for the do-be construction came from Flickinger and Wasow ( 2013 ), Wasow et al ( 2015 ), and Melnick and Wasow ( 2019 ). Data for that -relativizers came from Hinrichs et al ( 2015 ) and Grafmiller et al ( 2018 ), and data for the extrapositions came from Francis ( 2010 ) and Francis and Michaelis ( 2014 , 2017 ). We wrestled way better than I thought we would.…”

Usage-based constructionist approaches and Large Language Models

“…o A fuller, deeper appreciation of information structure and lexical semantics can unlock puzzles that have long been assumed to require syntactic stipulations, including island constraints, scope, anaphora, and binding (Ackerman and Nikolaeva 2014;Cole, Hermon, and Yanti 2014;Culicover and Jackendoff 2005;Cuneo and Goldberg 2022;Francis and Michaelis 2017;Goldberg and Michaelis 2017;Israel 2001;Ackerman and Nikolaeva 2014;Namboodiripad et al 2022).…”

“…The frequencies of constructions and the frequencies of their subparts simultaneously influence language processing and language change (Baayen and Prado Martin 2005;Bybee, 2010;Goldberg and Lee 2021;Gries and Hilpert 2010;Traugott & Trousdale, 2013). And relationships among constructions and the forms of constructions are shaped by users goals and conversational demands over diachronic time (e.g., Francis & Michaelis 2017;DuBois, 2014;Givón, 2014).…”