Postverbal BehaviorCompared to many languages, English has relatively fixed word order, but the ordering among phrases following the verb exhibits a good deal of variation. This monograph explores factors that influence the choice among possible orders of postverbal elements, testing hypotheses using a combination of corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments. Wasow's final chapters explore how studies of language use bear on issues in linguistic theory, with attention to the roles of quantitative data and Chomsky's arguments against the use of statistics and probability in linguistics. |
Contents
Grammatical Weight | 15 |
Evaluating Characterizations of Weight | 23 |
Length and Complexity | 32 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
ambiguity avoidance analysis argue argument attachment ambiguities Brown corpus categorical chapter Chomsky Chomsky's clause coded complex NPs Computational Linguistics connectionism constituent ordering constraints corpora corpus studies dative alternation definition direct object discourse disfluencies double object construction E-language English entail evidence examples experiment factors formulated frequency goal grammar grammarians grammatical weight Grant's letters Hawkins Hawkins's heavy NP shift Hence Herb Clark HNPS rates idioms influencing ordering information status information structure internalist intuitions Ivan Sag Jeff Kent judgments language acquisition Larson length Lexical Bias linguistic literature markedness NP Complex NP object object NP occur parser parsing particle phrasal nodes possible Potentially Ambiguous predictions prepositional principle psycholinguistic question relative role semantic sentence shifted NPs significant simply speakers species statistical Switchboard corpus syntax theme theory tion transparent collocations Treebank types usage data utterance V-Prt V₁ verb verb-particle construction Wasow weight and information weight effects