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Abstract:
In several languages, it has been shown that subject relative
clauses, such as (1) are easier to comprehend than object relative
clauses, such as (2).
Frazier (1987) proposed the Active Filler Strategy (AFS), which
explains the preference for subject relatives in structural terms.
Gibson (1998) explains the preference in terms of the memory load
of the alternative interpretations. Both theories predict that
relative clauses will initially be analysed as a subject relative
clause, and that semantic and pragmatic information will not
influence this initial assignment.
However, when the head noun of the relative clause is inanimate,
there may be no preference to assign it the subject role, as
inanimate entities typically take the object role of a sentence. In
a corpus of newspaper texts object relative clauses with an animate
head did not occur, whereas object relative clauses with an
inanimate head (4) were quite frequent.
The question is whether there still is an initial preference for
subject relative clauses in sentences like (3) and (4), which have
an inanimate object. To test this, we presented readers with
subject and object relative clauses, in which we varied the animacy
of the object of the relative clause. Two experiments were
conducted: a self-paced reading experiment and an eye tracking
experiment. In both experiments the difference in reading times
between subject and object relative clauses disappeared when the
object of the relative clause was inanimate. The results provide
evidence against the theories described above, and support theories
that claim that semantic or pragmatic information is taken into
account in initial parsing decisions.
References
Frazier, L. (1987). Syntactic processing: Evidence from Dutch.
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,
5, 519-559.
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic
dependencies.
Cognition,
68, 1-76.
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