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. 253–284

Chapter 12
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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Uncertainty reduction in sentence processing
  • 3.Chinese relative clauses
    • 3.1Ambiguities in Chinese relative clauses
    • 3.2Experimental studies of Chinese RC processing
    • 3.3The role of animacy in Chinese RC processing
  • 4.Predicting the processing difficulty of Chinese RCs
    • 4.1Chinese grammars
    • 4.2Counting constructions in the Chinese treebank
    • 4.3Modeling results: The animacy effect in Chinese RC processing
    • 4.4Discussions
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.250.13che
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