کد مقاله کد نشریه سال انتشار مقاله انگلیسی نسخه تمام متن
926748 921899 2007 34 صفحه PDF دانلود رایگان
عنوان انگلیسی مقاله ISI
Minimization of dependency length in written English
موضوعات مرتبط
علوم زیستی و بیوفناوری علم عصب شناسی علوم اعصاب شناختی
پیش نمایش صفحه اول مقاله
Minimization of dependency length in written English
چکیده انگلیسی

Gibson’s Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) [Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1–76; Gibson, E. 2000. The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O’Neil (Eds.), Image, Language, Brain (pp. 95–126). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] proposes that the processing complexity of a sentence is related to the length of its syntactic dependencies: longer dependencies are more difficult to process. The DLT is supported by a variety of phenomena in language comprehension. This raises the question: Does language production reflect a preference for shorter dependencies as well? I examine this question in a corpus study of written English, using the Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank. The DLT makes a number of predictions regarding the length of constituents in different contexts; these predictions were tested in a series of statistical tests. A number of findings support the theory: the greater length of subject noun phrases in inverted versus uninverted quotation constructions, the greater length of direct-object versus subject NPs, the greater length of postmodifying versus premodifying adverbial clauses, the greater length of relative-clause subjects within direct-object NPs versus subject NPs, the tendency towards “short-long” ordering of postmodifying adjuncts and coordinated conjuncts, and the shorter length of subject NPs (but not direct-object NPs) in clauses with premodifying adjuncts versus those without.

ناشر
Database: Elsevier - ScienceDirect (ساینس دایرکت)
Journal: Cognition - Volume 105, Issue 2, November 2007, Pages 300–333
نویسندگان
,