Locality and Expectation Effects in Hindi Preverbal Constituent Ordering

We investigate the relative impact of two influential theories of language comprehension, viz., Dependency Locality Theory(Gibson 2000; DLT) and Surprisal Theory (Hale 2001, Levy 2008), on preverbal constituent ordering in Hindi, a predominantly SOV language with flexibleword order. Prior work in Hindi has shown that word order scrambling is influenced by information structure constraints in discourse. However, the impact of cognitively grounded factors on Hindi constituent ordering is relatively underexplored. We test the hypothesis that dependency length minimization is a significant predictor of syntactic choice, once information status and surprisal measures (estimated from n-gram i.e., trigram and incremental dependency parsing models) have been added to a machine learning model. Towards this end, we setup a framework to generate meaning-equivalent grammatical variants of Hindi sentences by linearizing preverbal constituents of projective dependency trees in the Hindi-Urdu Treebank (HUTB) corpus of written text. Our results indicate that dependency length displays a weak effect in predicting reference sentences (amidst variants) over and above the aforementioned predictors. Overall, trigram surprisal outperforms dependency length and parser surprisal by a huge margin and our analyses indicate that maximizing lexical predictability is the primary driving force behind preverbal constituent ordering choices in Hindi. The success of trigram surprisal notwithstanding, dependency length minimization predicts non-canonical reference sentences having fronted direct objects over variants containing the canonical word order, cases where surprisal estimatesfail due to their bias towards frequent structures and word sequences. Locality effects persist over the Given-New preference of subject-object ordering in Hindi. Accessibility and local statistical biases discussed in the sentence processing literature are plausible explanations for the success of trigram surprisal. Further, we conjecture that the presence of case markers is a strong factor potentially overriding the pressure for dependency length minimization in Hindi. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the information locality hypothesis and theories of language production.

Preverbal subjects and preverbal particles

Basic sentences in Maōri have VSO constituent ordering, but the nominative argument can precede the verb in constructions that have sentence-initial Topics, Focused constituents, or negatives. In the constructions with pre-verbal nominatives there are restrictions on the tense-denoting particles that may be present. This chapter proposes that, except in the case of subject Topics, when a nominative expression precedes the verb of which it is an argument, it has raised to Spec, Fin/T within a CP domain where it is c-commanded by higher Tense. The structural analysis is developed in the terms of a cartographic approach, drawing in particular on proposals of Belletti (2015) as to reduced forms of cleft CPs and separating out distinctions in the locations of splits and hybrids involving Force and Finiteness in the left periphery.

Stacking embedded sentences

This chapter discusses how recursion works for several types of verbal predicates. Every verb that allows for a sentential complement based on a verb can form the core of such a complement itself. These comprise verbs of perception such as see, hear, feel and verbs of mental content such as know, remember, believe, suppose, and the like. The type of overall constituent ordering in Turkish is often characterized as subject-object-verb; the verb is preferably put at the end of the sentence and all other constituents precede it. This has important implications for the internal structure of the Turkish sentence, namely that the embedded verb in a sentential complement undergoes the process of nominalization, as is visible in suffixes signalling tense and person. Passive verbs are formed by suffixation and this explains why stacking of passive forms is quite common as well.

Ordering patterns

After an extensive account of the basics of Turkish grammar, this chapter offers nothing but ordering principles: the first two sections are about the morphotactics of nouns and verbs, and noun phrase structure. All this is represented in tabular form. The ordering principles for noun phrases (including adverbial and postpositional phrases) in a clause is dealt with next, and thus, constituent order in nominal, existential, and verbal sentences is discussed in the third section. Dependent clauses are the topic of the fourth section, which also gives an overview of verbal linking suffixes to form such clauses. The final section shows that constituent ordering in verbal sentences can better be understood in terms of the pragmatic notions Topic and Focus than in terms of traditional distribution of Subject and Objects (SOV).

Negation and Constituent Ordering

The addition of a marker of sentential negation to an affirmative sentence can give rise to effects in the morpho-syntactic make-up of the sentence. This chapter examines selected instances in languages where the constituent ordering of a sentence including a sentential negation marker differs from that of the corresponding non-negative sentence. For the data examined in this chapter, the greatest number of affirmative/negative ordering contrasts are observed when the negative is initial and especially when it has the characteristics of a verb. But disruptions to constituent ordering are found also when the negative is medial or final, and not just with negative verbs, but also when the negative is a particle or an affix. The study of disruptions in the surface sequencing of constituents in negative sentences has the potential to improve our understanding both of the possible location of negation in clauses and of syntactic processes more generally.

Parsed Corpus as a Source for Testing Generalizations in Japanese Syntax

In this paper, we discuss constituent ordering generalizations in Japanese. Japanese has SOV as its basic order, but a significant range of argument order variations brought about by ‘scrambling’ is permitted. Although scrambling does not induce much in the way of semantic effects, it is conceivable that marked orders are derived from the unmarked order under some pragmatic or other motivations. The difference in the effect of basic and derived order is not reflected in native speaker’s grammaticality judgments, but we suggest that the intuition about the ordering of arguments may be attested in corpus data. By using the Keyaki treebank (a proper subset of which is NINJAL Parsed Corpus of Modern Japanese (NPCMJ)), it is shown that the naturally-occurring corpus data confirm that marked orderings of arguments are less frequent than their unmarked ordering counterparts. We suggest some possible motivations lying behind the argument order variations.

What does constituent priming mean in the investigation of compound processing?

Most dictionary definitions for the term compound word characterize it as a word that itself contains two or more words. Thus, a compound word such as goldfish is composed of the constituent words gold and fish. In this report, we present evidence that compound words such as goldfish might not contain the words gold and fish, but rather positionally bound compound constituents (e.g., gold- and -fish) that are distinct and often in competition with their whole word counterparts. This conceptualization has significant methodological consequences: it calls into question the assumption that, in a traditional visual constituent priming paradigm, the participant can be said to be presented with constituents as primes. We claim that they are not presented with constituents. Rather, they are presented with competing free-standing words. We present evidence for the processing of Hebrew compound words that supports this perspective by revealing that, counter-intuitively, prime constituent frequency has an attenuating effect on constituent priming. We relate our findings to previous findings in the study of German compound processing to show that the effect that we report is fundamentally morphological rather than positional or visual in nature. In contrast to German in which compounds are always head-final morphologically, Hebrew compounds are always head initial. In addition, whereas German compounds are written as single words, Hebrew compounds are always written with spaces between constituents. Thus, the commonality of patterning across German and Hebrew is independent of visual form and constituent ordering, revealing, as we claim, core features of the constituent priming paradigm and compound processing.

Grammatical Encoding

Grammatical encoding has the task of selecting and retrieving the syntactic and lexical forms that can convey non-linguistic thoughts, and then determining the morphological forms and their constituent ordering in preparation for their phonological spell-out and eventual externalization. This chapter begins by broadly describing a consensus view of the general architecture of grammatical encoding. It then describes ongoing debates that operate within (or question aspects of) this consensus view, including about the content and structure and selection-then-retrieval character of grammatical encoding; the incrementality or scope of grammatical encoding; the factors that influence syntactic choice; the rational or optimal nature of production; effects of ongoing learning; and production in dialogue. It closes on a constructive note, highlighting fundamental insights that we have gained as a field along the way.

Referential hierarchies: A new look at some historical and typological patterns

This paper proposes a diachronic typology for the various patterns that have been referred to as Hierarchical Alignment or Inverse Alignment. Previous typological studies have tried to explain such patterns as grammatical reflections of a universal Referential Hierarchy, in which first person outranks second person outranks third person and humans outrank other animates outrank inanimates. However, our study shows that most of the formal properties of hierarchy-sensitive constructions are essentially predictable from their historical sources. We have identified three sources for hierarchical person marking, three for direction marking, two for obviative case marking, and one for hierarchical constituent ordering. These sources suggest that there is more than one explanation for hierarchical alignment: one is consistent with Givón’s claim that hierarchical patterns are a grammaticalization of generic topicality; another is consistent with DeLancey’s claim that hierarchies reflect the deictic distinction between present (1/2) and distant (3) participants; another is simply a new manifestation of a common asymmetrical pattern, the use of zero marking for third persons. More importantly, the evolution of hierarchical grammatical patterns does not reflect a consistent universal ranking of participants – at least in those cases where we can see (or infer) historical stages in the evolution of these properties, different historical stages appear to reflect different hierarchical rankings of participants, especially first and second person. This leads us to conclude that the diversity of hierarchical patterns is an artifact of grammatical change, and that in general, the presence of hierarchical patterns in synchronic grammars is not somehow conditioned by some more general universal hierarchy.