Investigating the additive probability of repeated language production decisions
Sean Wallis | Survey of English Usage, UCL
This paper introduces an experimental paradigm based on probabilistic evidence of the interaction between
construction decisions in a parsed corpus. The approach is demonstrated using ICE-GB, a one million-word corpus of English. It
finds an interaction between attributive adjective phrases in noun phrases with a noun head, such that the probability of adding
adjective phrases falls successively. The same pattern is much weaker in adverbs preceding a verb phrase, implying this decline is
not a universal phenomenon. Noun phrase postmodifying clauses exhibit a similar initial fall in the probability of successive
clauses modifying the same NP head, and embedding clauses modifying new NP heads. Successive postmodification
shows a secondary phenomenon of an increase in additive probability in longer sequences, apparently due to ‘templating’ effects.
The author argues that these results can only be explained as cognitive and communicative natural phenomena acting on and within
recursive grammar rules.
Keywords: additive probability, interaction evidence, language production, parsing, grammar evaluation
Published online: 01 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17093.wal
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17093.wal
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