Abstract
As I pointed out in Lecture VII, in effect the Listener’s task is to “recover”, via interactions between his operator and his buffer, the naturally ordered cognitive structures from which the Speaker necessarily started. F VIII-II gives the essence of this abstract performance theory as it applies to Listeners’ comprehending sentences that have been unnaturally ordered to satisfy the salience motives of Speakers.
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Analyses of most of these transform types were given earlier in this lecture.
However, it would be most intriguing if, as we would expect, correct judgments of the “foils” displayed exactly the same predicted differences in processing times.
Forster and Olbrei (1973), it may be recalled, used this type of “foil” in a study of processing times for simplex vs complex sentences, matched for length, e.g., the wealthy child attended a private school vs the dress Pam wore looked ugly.
Primarily, in theory, the inefficiency of a model which generates trees more-or-less ad libitum in search of a match to the structure of a received sentence and, empirically, the general failure of DTC (the Derivational Theory of Complexity).
See Miller and Chomsley (1963, p. 475) for a much earlier expression of this same notion.
The original research was done by Forster as his doctoral thesis in 1964 under my direction and subsequently published in Forster (1966, 1967).
Here I can only indicate these many linguistic sources of relevance to the developing APG; in the full version, of course, the individual papers will be treated in detail and related to the various functional notions. Also, much of this recent work is most relevant to what will be the later chapters of the expanded version, particularly planned chapters on Efficiency vs Complexity in Speaker/Listener Interactions, Pragmatics of Language Use in Situational Contexts, and Relations to Other Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Models.
Note that the same applies to center-embeddings (the boy the girl Pierre loves likes hates spaghetti vs the boy the girl like hates spaghetti).
In an already-written Chap. 2 of my in-progress Toward an Abstract Performance Grammar, I reach exactly the same conclusion.
If the relativized NP is part of a prepositional phrase, then the preposition must accompany the relative PN.
Basic and and but conjoiners always must be centered between clauses.
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© 1980 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
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Osgood, C.E. (1980). Processing of Unnaturally Ordered Sentences in Comprehending. In: Lectures on Language Performance. Springer Series in Language and Communication, vol 7. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-87289-1_8
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