Aiming at shorter dependencies : the role of agreement morphology
Ros, Idoia and Santesteban, Mikel and Fukumura, Kumiko and Laka, Itziar (2015) Aiming at shorter dependencies : the role of agreement morphology. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. (https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2014.994009)
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Abstract
This study examined word order preferences as a function of phrasal length in Basque. Basque is an OV-language with flexible sentence word order and rich verb agreement. Contrary to the universal short-before-long preference predicted by availability models, Hawkins has argued that short-before-long orders are preferred in VO-languages such as English, whereas long-before-short orders are preferred in OV-languages such as Japanese (Hawkins, 2004). However, it is unclear how length affects word order preferences when an OV-language has rich verb agreement and allows postverbal arguments. We found a general long-before-short preference, and a tendency to place the verb in a sentence-medial position when one constituent is long. We argue that since agreement morphology signals the thematic role and case of surrounding phrases, it contributes to speeding up sentence processing. We conclude that morphologically rich languages employ both general adjacency mechanisms and language-specific resources to enhance language efficiency.
ORCID iDs
Ros, Idoia, Santesteban, Mikel, Fukumura, Kumiko ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3449-9503 and Laka, Itziar;-
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Item type: Article ID code: 50841 Dates: DateEvent7 January 2015Published7 January 2015Published Online2015AcceptedNotes: Date of Acceptance: 04/11/2014 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience on 07/01/2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/0.1080/23273798.2014.994009. Subjects: Language and Literature
Medicine > Internal medicine > Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. NeuropsychiatryDepartment: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Psychological Sciences and Health > Psychology Depositing user: Pure Administrator Date deposited: 18 Dec 2014 14:06 Last modified: 29 Sep 2024 14:55 Related URLs: URI: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/50841