Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Linear asymmetries and incremental parsing 

Klaus Abels en Ad Neeleman

UCL

Linear asymmetries pose a challenge for syntactic theory but may yield to an explanation in terms of sentence parsing, given the inherent left-to-right nature of this process. We therefore explore the option of a parsing-based account of Greenberg’s (1963) Universal 20. Universal 20 describes a word order asymmetry in noun phrases which can be captured if movement of the noun is exclusively leftward (Cinque 2005 and Abels and Neeleman 2012). Our account is based on the hypothesis that rightward movement of obligatory elements leads to a specific processing difficulty that we call the missing-filler effect. Independent evidence for this effect comes from self-paced reading and maze paradigm experiments that replicate and extend earlier findings by Staub and colleagues (2006) regarding the parsing of heavy-XP shift in the context of optionally and obligatorily transitive verbs. We conclude that the absence of rightward movement in the noun phrase need not be attributed to a syntactic constraint but can be traced back to the missing-filler effect if we assume that parsing effort affects language acquisition, which in turn affects typological frequency (as argued in Hawkins 1990, 2009 and Kirby 1999).