Chapter published in:
Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. Whitman
Edited by Kunio Nishiyama, Hideki Kishimoto and Edith Aldridge
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 250] 2018
► pp. 253–283

Parsing Chinese relative clauses with structural and non-structural cues

| Rochester Institute of Technology
| University of Georgia
This paper presents a word-by-word computational model of incremental processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. In particular, it discusses the processing of Chinese relative clauses guided by both structural preferences and frequencies of non-structural features like animacy. The information-theoretic metric Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003, 2006) mirrors the disambiguation effort which readers spend on each word and links theories of parsing to observed measurements in reading experiments, including the so-called animacy effect in psycholinguistic studies (Wu, Kaiser & Anderson 2012).
Keywords: relative clause, animacy, sentence processing, minimalist grammar, Entropy Reduction, computational modeling, information theory, Chinese
Published online: 12 December 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.250.13che
References

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