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Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages
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  • Open Access
  • Published: 23 December 2014

Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages

  • Jiwon Yun1,
  • Zhong Chen2,
  • Tim Hunter3,
  • John Whitman4 &
  • …
  • John Hale5 

Journal of East Asian Linguistics volume 24, pages 113–148 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing. We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexity metric, one that reflects a minimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender’s degree of uncertainty at each point in a sentence. We use this idea to quantify the intuition that people do comprehension work as they incrementally resolve ambiguity, word by word. We find that downward changes to this quantitative measure of uncertainty derive observed processing contrasts between Subject- and Object-extracted relative clauses. This demonstrates that the complexity metric, in conjunction with a minimalist grammar and corpus-based weights, accounts for the widely-observed Subject Advantage.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-4376, USA

    Jiwon Yun

  2. Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, USA

    Zhong Chen

  3. Institute of Linguistics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

    Tim Hunter

  4. Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853-4701, USA

    John Whitman

  5. Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853-4701, USA

    John Hale

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  1. Jiwon Yun
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  2. Zhong Chen
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  3. Tim Hunter
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  4. John Whitman
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  5. John Hale
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Correspondence to John Hale.

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Yun, J., Chen, Z., Hunter, T. et al. Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages. J East Asian Linguist 24, 113–148 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-014-9126-6

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  • Received: 03 October 2012

  • Accepted: 04 October 2013

  • Published: 23 December 2014

  • Issue Date: May 2015

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-014-9126-6

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Keywords

  • Relative clause
  • Information theory
  • Minimalism
  • Chinese
  • Japanese
  • Korean
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