Relative clause attachment biases are affected by the form of the relativiser: Evidence from French (original) (raw)
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EFFECT OF RELATIVE PRONOUN TYPE ON RELATIVE CLAUSE ATTACHMENT
assume that the form of anaphoric expressions signals the relative saliency of the antecedent. We argue that the form of relative pronouns in relative clauses has a similar function and therefore influences attachment preferences. We conducted two questionnaire experiments in which we investigated whether attachment preferences for ambiguous relative clauses are affected by the type of relative pronoun that is used. Experiment 1 showed a difference in attachment preference between qui and lequel, indicating that the form of the relative pronoun affects attachment preferences. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the difference observed in Experiment 1 is not due to differences in informativity between qui and lequel, suggesting that instead, it is due to a difference in markedness (qui is more frequent and shorter).
Early and late preferences in relative clause attachment in Portuguese and Spanish
2007
This study presents new data about the cross-language application of the Late Closure principle , whose universality was put in question by data from Spanish . Using sentences containing a restrictive relative clause unambiguously modifying the first or the second noun of a complex NP (os cúmplices do ladrão/o cúmplice dos ladrões que fugiram), this study compares the behavior of Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers participating in a self-paced reading task. The data confirm that, in early phases of processing, attachment preferences are driven by a locality principle such as Late Closure. Based on a review of studies on Portuguese, Spanish and other Romance languages, we argue that the high-versus low--attachment difference across languages emerges cleanly only in off-line tasks, such as questionnaire studies, thus limiting the types of explanations for the cross-linguistic differences. We also advance an explanation for the high attachment preferences found in unspeeded questionnaire studies based on the
Relative Clause Attachment in English and Spanish: A Production Study
2008
The Implicit Prosody Hypothesis assumes that differences in individual languages' attachment preferences for syntactically ambiguous sentences are due to the languages' different prosodic systems. For example, when a relative clause modifies a complex noun phrase (NP1 NP2 RC), a prosodic break after NP1 is said to trigger a low attachment interpretation, while a break after NP2 triggers high attachment. English and Spanish participants read aloud sentences of this type, but showed no correlation between prosodic phrasing pattern and attachment choice. Both English and Spanish readers pronounced the majority of sentences with the strongest prosodic break following NP2. However, responses to comprehension questions immediately following each production showed that Spanish speakers preferred a high attachment interpretation, while English speakers preferred low attachment. Our findings provide evidence against a prosodic account of overall attachment preferences for this construction and provide insights into the mechanisms of reading aloud.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2008
This study investigates the manner in which syntax, prosody, and context interact when second- and fourth-semester college-level English-French learners process relative clause (RC) attachment to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2) in complex nominal expressions such asle secrétaire du psychologue qui se promène (au centre ville)“the secretary of the psychologist who takes a walk (downtown).” Learners' interpretations were affected by the length of the RC, specifically its phonological weight. Effects of intonation contour were found only in a subset of learners. In a response time (RT) experiment that manipulated contexts, fourth-semester learners showed a final bias for NP1 attachment in interpretation but an initial RT bias for NP2 attachment. Second-semester learners also produced a NP2 attachment bias in RTs, but no asymmetry in interpretation was found. We argue that the processing of RC attachment by English-French learners requires a task-s...
Semantics and Linguistic Theory
Schlenker (2013) gives a number of puzzling counterexamples to the widely accepted claim that non-restrictive relative clauses (NRCs) are always interpreted with respect to the global context, and never in the scope of entailment-canceling operators such as if. Local readings are available for NRCs attached to their host clause by a coordinating coherence relation. This paper develops a theoretical explanation of this pattern. We argue that NRCs are interpreted locally only if they are attached locally to their host clause both in syntax and in discourse structure. Subordinating coherence relations like Elaboration and Explanation resist discourse attachment in the scope of if because they tend to go together with relations that can only hold between speech acts. Like other subordinate clauses, NRCs tend to express subordinating coherence relations, which ultimately explains their pervasive tendency for global interpretation. In other words, this study shows how a theory of discours...
The Accessibility Hierarchy in Chinese Relative Clauses
Generative grammarians often believe that learner language is systematic in that it adheres to fundamental principles that guide natural languages. For instance, numerous second language acquisition (SLA) studies have reported that learners' acquisition order of English relative clauses (RCs) follows the "Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy" (NPAH). The NPAH is roughly presented as Subject>Object>Indirect Object (IO)>Object of Preposition (OPreP), where ">" means "easier to relativize", or "easier to acquire" as many SLA researchers interprets. However, recent studies raise doubts to the implicative power of the NPAH in the L2 acquisition of East Asian languages. Specifically, no previous studies have examined the relative acquisition difficulty across the above-mentioned four types of RCs in Chinese. Chinese uses the gap strategy for Subject and Object relativization, and the resumptive pronoun strategy for relativization in IO and OPreP positions. This study explores (in)consistencies between Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners' learner language and the NPAH. We found that learners rely more on "pronoun" strategies as the position goes lower on the hierarchy. That is consistent with the NPAH observation that pronoun retention is more common in lower positions. Further analysis found that each individual participant's learner language always adheres to the NPAH in the uses of gap versus pronoun strategies.
Seeing events vs. entities: The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses
Journal of Memory and Language, 2019
We present the results of three offline questionnaires (one attachment preference study and two acceptability judgments) and two eye-tracking studies in French and English, investigating the resolution of the ambiguity between pseudo relative and relative clause interpretations. This structural and interpretive ambiguity has recently been shown to play a central role in the explanation of apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries in relative clause attachment (Grillo and Costa, 2014; Grillo et al., 2015). This literature has argued that pseudo relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their structural and interpretive simplicity. This paper adds to this growing body of literature in two ways. First we show that, in contrast to previous findings, French speakers prefer to attach relative clauses to the most local antecedent once pseudo relative availability is controlled for. We then provide direct support for the pseudo relative preference: grammatically forced disambiguation to a relative clause interpretation leads to degraded acceptability and greater processing cost in a pseudo relative environment than maintaining compatibility with a pseudo relative.
The Role of Animacy and Structural Information in Relative Clause Attachment: Evidence From Chinese
Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a rating task to examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information.
Evidence of the accessibility hierarchy in relative clauses in Chinese as a second language
Relative clause (RC) structures are productive and complex in Chinese. While second language acquisition studies of RCs in English has a long tradition, it is only in recent years that the Chinese as a second/foreign language researchers started to pay close attention to the comparative difficulties of different types of Chinese RCs for learners. A well-known markedness generalization regarding the RC structure is the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (AH), and its implications in second language acquisition have been well-attested in English and other postnominal RCs. This research tests if Chinese as a foreign language learners’ production ease of different RC types adheres to the order of the AH, and if such markedness is reflected in RC-forming strategies in learners’ interlanguage. Learners in a written sentence combination task produced more target-like subject and direct object RCs than indirect object and object of preposition RCs. Further evidence for a subject RC preference was found in error analysis. Meanwhile, learners used gap and pronoun strategies within the AH constraint, indicating that their interlanguage grammar is comparable to that of natural languages. We conclude that the implicational generalization of the AH holds true in second language (L2) Chinese.