What factors are associated with dependency distances to ensure easy comprehension? A case study of ba sentences in Mandarin Chinese

Dependency distance, referring to the linear distance between two syntactically related words, is often minimized, because long-distance dependencies (LDDs) may cause processing difficulties. However, LDDs can be found in some sentences, for example, Chinese ba sentences, because besides LDDs, other factors also influence the comprehension difficulty. Based on ba sentences extracted from three genres: interviews, essays and research papers, this study investigated the impact of givenness, word frequencies and adverbial lengths on dependency distances. The results show that: 1) givenness of subjects and NP2s in ba sentences affects dependency distances in all three genres, and the effect is consistent among genres; 2) word frequencies of subjects in interviews also affect dependency distances, but such an impact has not been found in essays and research papers; 3) adverbial lengths and NP2 lengths do not counterbalance each other to limit dependency distances. These findings suggest that: 1) comprehension difficulty is influenced by multiple factors; 2) the impact of the three factors on dependency distances is not influenced by genres.