Locality effects and predictability in sentence construction: An investigation of ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese

This study investigated the relationship between two critical cognitive factors in constructing alternative ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese: locality effects that predict a processing advantage for sentences where distances between syntactically related words are minimized, and predictability that predicts heavy processing difficulty for a word when its possibility of occurrence is low. Locality effects were measured by dependency distance and predictability was quantified by n-gram surprisal and Dependency Grammar (DG) surprisal. The results showed that locality effects and predictability co-exist in sentence construction: (a) there is a competitive relationship between dependency distance and n-gram surprisal in constructing naturally occurring ba sentences and the corresponding SVO sentences; (b) the competition between dependency distance and n-gram surprisal was also found in constructing ba sentences and SVO sentences respectively; (c) there is a competitive relationship between dependency distance and n-gram surprisal as well as a competitive relationship between dependency distance and DG surprisal in constructing naturally occurring ba sentences and ba sentences converted from SVO sentences. It is worth noting that, in some cases, dependency distance and DG surprisal cooperate with each other. These findings have important implications for theories of language production and cognition.

摘要:

本文基于普通话中能相互变换的把字句及主动宾句，探讨局域效应与 预测性两个认知因素在句式构建中的关系。局域效应指出有句法关系 的词之间的距离越小，句子越容易处理；预测性则指出单词出现的可 能性越小，处理难度越大。本文以依存距离衡量局域效应，以n 元惊 异值和依存句法惊异值衡量预测性。研究结果显示，在句式构建过程 中，局域效应与预测性共存：(1) 依存距离与n 元惊异值在构建把字 句与同义主动宾句时存在竞争关系；(2) 这种竞争关系也分别出现在 把字句及主动宾句的构建过程中；(3) 依存距离与n 元惊异值以及依 存距离与依存句法惊异值在构建自然出现的把字句与由主动宾句转 换得到的把字句时也有竞争关系。值得一提的是，依存距离与依存句 法惊异值在某些情况下存在合作关系。这些发现对语言产出和认知理 论具有重要意义。