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A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages

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A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons IRCS Technical Reports Series Institute for Research in Cognitive Science April 1995 A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages Owen Rambow University of Pennsylvania Aravind K. Joshi University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports Rambow, Owen and Joshi, Aravind K., "A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages" (1995). IRCS Technical Reports Series. 127. https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/127 University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-95-13. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/127 For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages Abstract Like many verb-final languages, German displays considerable word-order freedom: there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal arguments of a verb, as long as the verb remains in final position. This effect is referred to as “scrambling”, and is interpreted in transformational frameworks as leftward movement of the arguments. Furthermore, arguments from an embedded clause may move out of their clause; this effect is referred to as “long-distance scrambling”. While scrambling has recently received considerable attention in the syntactic literature, the status of long-distance scrambling has only rarely been addressed. The reason for this is the problematic status of the data: not only is long-distance scrambling highly dependent on pragmatic context, it also is strongly subject to degradation due to processing constraints. As in the case of center-embedding, it is not immediately clear whether to assume that observed unacceptability of highly complex sentences is due to grammatical restrictions, or whether we should assume that the competence grammar does not place any restrictions on scrambling (and that, therefore, all such sentences are in fact grammatical), and the unacceptability of some (or most) of the grammatically possible word orders is due to processing limitations. In this paper, we will argue for the second view by presenting a processing model for German. Comments University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-95-13. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/127 The Institute For Research In Cognitive Science A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages by Owen Rambow Aravind K. Joshi P E University of Pennsylvania 3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400C Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 April 1995 N (originally published in 1994) Site of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Research in Cognitive Science N University of Pennsylvania IRCS Report 95-13 Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1740 A Pro cessing Mo del for Free Word Order Languages Owen Rambow and Aravind K Joshi UniversityofPennsylvania rambowjoshilinccisup ennedu In Perspectives on SentenceProcessing C Clifton Jr L Frazier and K Rayner editors Lawrence Erlbaum Asso ciates INTRODUCTION German is a verbnal language Likemanyverbnal languages such as Hindi Japanese and Korean it displays considerable wordorder freedom there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal arguments of a verb as long as the verb remains in nal p osition This eect is referred to as scrambling and is interpreted in transformational frameworks as leftward movement of the arguments Furthermore arguments from an emb edded clause maymove out of their clause this eect is referred to as longdistance scrambling While scrambling has recently received considerable attention in the syntactic literature the status of longdistance scrambling has only rarely b een addressed The reason for this is the problematic status of the data not only is longdistance scrambling highly dep endent on pragmatic context it also is strongly sub ject to degradation due to pro cessing constraints As in the case of centeremb edding it is not immediately clear whether to assume that observed unacceptability of highly complex sentences is due to grammatical restrictions or whether we should assume that the comp etence grammar do es not place any restrictions on scrambling and that therefore all suchsentences are in fact grammatical and the unacceptability of some or most of the grammatically p ossible word orders is due to pro cessing limitations In this pap er we will argue for the second view by presenting a pro cessing mo del for German German is an interesting language to study from the p oint of view of b oth comp etence syntax and p erformance b ecause it not only allows scrambling but also topicalization of arguments Topicalization refers to the movementof a single elementinto the sentenceinitial p osition in the ro ot clause Because German is a verbsecond language in every sentence some elementmust topicalize Like scrambling and like topicalization in English topicalization in wever the twotyp es of movement dier in terms of their linguistic German can create unb ounded dep endencies Ho prop erties for example scrambling can create new anaphoric bindings while topicalization cannot Web elhuth In addition to the linguistic dierences there is also a pro cessing dierence longdistance topicalization into sentenceinitial p osition app ears to b e easier to pro cess than longdistance scrambling of the same element over a similar distance A simple pro cessing account that somehow measures the number of intervening lexical items must fail Thus not only do es the German data call for a pro cessing mo del but the mo del must b e sensitivetosubtle dierences in the constructions involved Our pro cessing mo del for freeword order languages has two imp ortant prop erties The pro cessing mo del provides a metric that makes predictions ab out pro cessing diculty on an op en ended scale This prop erty allows us to verify our mo del with resp ect to the results from psycholinguistic exp eriments as well as from nativesp eaker intuition The pro cessing mo del is tightly coupled with the comp etence grammar in the sense that the grammar directly determines the b ehavior of the parser This tight coupling means that if two sup ercially similar constructions have rather dierent linguistic analyses then their pro cessing b ehavior maywell b e predicted to b e dierent The pap er is structured as follows In the next section we discuss the relevant issues in German syntax and isolate two phenomena for whichwe wish to derive a pro cessing mo del We then present a grammar formalism TAG and an asso ciated automaton BEPDA After that wegive linguistic examples and show that the mo del makes correct predictions with resp ect to certain crosslinguistic psycholinguistic data We thereup on discuss the extensions to the basic mo del that are required to handle longdistance scrambling Weshowhow the extended mo del makes plausible predictions for the two phenomena that weidentify in the data section GERMAN DATA German is a verbnal language but in addition it is verbsecond which means that in a ro ot clause the nite verb main verb or auxiliary moves into the second p osition in the clause standardly assumed to b e the COMP p osition This divides the ro ot clause into two parts the p osition in front of the nite verb the Vorfeld or Foreeld VF and the p ositions b etween the nite and nonnite verbs the Mittelfeld or Middleeld MF The This work was partially supp orted by the following grants ARODAAL CDARPA NJ NSF IRI and Ben Franklin SC Wewould like to thank an anonymous reviewer for very insightful and helpful comments and Michael Niv for helpful discussions Note that in the case of clauses with simple tensed verbs the nal p osition in the clause for the nonnite verb remains empty VF must contain exactly one constituent whichcanbeany element an argument or an adjunct or the non nite verb Three typ es of wordorder variation movement in transformational frameworks are p ossible in extrapositionemb edded clauses app ear b ehind the nonnite verb topicalization lls the VF with an element from the MF and scrambling permutes the elements of the MF We will discuss them in turn Extrap osition While nominal arguments must app ear in the MF clausal arguments may app ear b ehind the verb in clausenal p osition In fact nite sub clauses must app ear in this p osition An example a da Peter dem Kunden den Kuhlsc hrank zu reparieren zu helfen versucht that Peter the clientDAT the refrigerator ACC to repair to help tries that Peter tries to help the client repair the refrigerator b da Peter versucht dem Kunden zu helfen den Kuhlsc hrank zu reparieren c da Peter versucht dem Kunden den Kuhlsc hrank zu reparieren zu helfen a shows the unextrap osed centeremb edded order b is the fully extrap osed order while c shows that an extrap osition of a centerem b edded twoclause structure is p ossible The fully extrap osed version is by far the preferred one in b oth sp oken and written German esp ecially in situations with more than two clauses Topicalization We give some examples of topicalization a Der Lehrer hat den Kindern dieses Buch gegeb en the teacher NOM has the children DAT this b o ok ACC given The teacher has given this b o ok to the children b Dieses Buch hat der Lehrer den Kindern gegeb en In a the default word order the sub ject is topicalized into the VF In b the direct ob ject has topicalized into the VF so that the sub ject remains in the MF An adjunct could also o ccupy the
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