Abstract
With regard to argument serialization, a number of prominence hierarchies have been proposed. We discuss possible ways how such hierarchies might be involved in the reverse process, the process of recovering syntactic functions from a given input string during human language comprehension. We present three experiments and an accompanying corpus study focusing on German sentences with two locally ambiguous objects, both filled by animate NPs. Temporarily, the two objects can be parsed as ‘accusative object preceding dative object’ and as ‘dative object preceding accusative object’. Our results show a strong preference for the order ‘ACC before DAT’. We explore the consequences of this finding for both grammar and frequency based approaches to the human parsing mechanism. We show that accounts in which units of size greater than a single DP can compete with each other are difficult to maintain given our experimental results. We argue instead that our results are best explained in terms of a ranking between cases/syntactic functions, reflecting both the case hierarchy and the frequency ranking that we found in our corpus data.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
There is an ongoing debate whether frequency information is a matter of performance systems only, or whether such information is coded in some way within the mental grammar as well; see Bod et al. (2003) for a comprehensive discussion. This issue is orthogonal to our purposes.
- 3.
Reasons of space prevent us from discussing further grammar-based explanations of the preference under consideration. For example, if one assumes a fixed base order for the subject, direct object and indirect object, economy conditions on phrase-structure building and chain formation would make the same predictions.
- 4.
A potential exception is the verb überstellen (‘to commit somebody’).
- 5.
Take, for example, the verb verkaufen (‘to sell’). The patient argument of this verb can be characterized as [−human] because we normally think of animals and things but not humans, as being subject to acts of selling. However, this restriction is not inherent to the meaning of this verb but rather a restriction resulting from our world knowledge. It does not hold in societies in which slavery is found, either legally or illegally.
- 6.
For further information see http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/TIGER.
- 7.
For further information see http://www.ids-mannheim.de/cosmas2/uebersicht.html
- 8.
Note that calling the dative case a lexical case does not imply that dative case is always a lexical idiosyncratic property. This is clearly not so for ditransitive verbs and might not even been true in general for monotransitive verbs with a dative object (see Primus 2008).
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Acknowledgements
This work was done while the first author was at the University of Konstanz. The work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 471, Project D2). For helpful comments, we would like to thank the audience and organizers of the workshop and two anonymous reviewers.
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Häussler, J., Bader, M. (2012). Grammar- Versus Frequency-Driven Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: The Case of Double-Object Constructions. In: Lamers, M., de Swart, P. (eds) Case, Word Order and Prominence. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1463-2_12
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