Mitra Hoseingholian; Mohammad Rasekh mahand
Abstract
A resumptive pronoun is a pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent. The use of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses appears to be governed by structural complexity in grammar and usage. Hawkins’s (2004) Efficiency and complexity in grammars predicts a parallel effect ...
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A resumptive pronoun is a pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent. The use of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses appears to be governed by structural complexity in grammar and usage. Hawkins’s (2004) Efficiency and complexity in grammars predicts a parallel effect in usage: when the grammar permits the option of either resumptive pronoun or gap, resumptive pronouns should be used more often as structural complexity increases. By the results of four experiments including processing assessment, production task, an acceptability judgement task and listening experiment, the relation of relative clauses’ weight and the presence of a resumptive pronoun with an objective antecedent or lack of it is verified. The hypothesis was that with the increase of grammatical weight of relative clause, the need for a resumptive pronoun will be more. Finally, the results of four experiments are analyzed by SPSS software. The results which were based on the hypothesis, were not meaningful. It means that the presence or absence of resumptive pronoun in different grammatical weights does not make a meaningful difference. It means Persian speakers use lots of resumptive pronouns without attention to grammatical weights of relative clause.
Majid Alaee; Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand; Mahdi Tehrani Doost
Abstract
constituent ordering, is not arbitrary; rather, it is aimed at fulfilling efficiency principles. Length effect- as a formal characteristic- is a significant determinant in the occurrence of movement rules. The ultimate structural configuration of sentences is interwoven with processing ease. Adopting ...
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constituent ordering, is not arbitrary; rather, it is aimed at fulfilling efficiency principles. Length effect- as a formal characteristic- is a significant determinant in the occurrence of movement rules. The ultimate structural configuration of sentences is interwoven with processing ease. Adopting eye movement registration technique, the current research study aims to explore eye behavior in response to processing difficulty of syntactically different but semantically identical sentences and provide behavioral evidence for the effect of length on the occurrence of movement in structural sentence pairs in Persian. Encompassing two syntactic movements (relative clause extraposition and postposing) through 2 sets of 40 sentence pairs in two length levels (short and long), some eye behavior such as fixation count/duration and regression were registered and analyzed using SPSS. Regarding the patterns of fixation, when the constituents under study were short, there was either no significant difference before and after the occurrence of syntactic movement, or the mean of fixation count and duration was lower in sentences with canonical constituent ordering; however, the patterns appeared to be reversed and hence a significant difference was spotted by the increase of constituent length. Regarding regressions, the mean regressions declined after the post-verbal movement of constituents by the increase of length. It can be concluded that syntactic movement is weight-sensitive and aimed at easing processing difficulty. Also, the likelihood of post-verbal movement in extraposition and scrambling increases by the rise of length and driven by the incentive of increase of processing efficiency.
