Text Data as Evidence for Language Processing Principles: The Grammar of Ordered Events  

Oleh:

Prideaux, Gary D.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 11 no. 1 (1989), page 27-42.
Fulltext: 11_01_Prideaux.pdf (1.05MB)

Isi artikel

While most research dealing with language comprehension and production exploits experimental data, the present paper argues that a judicious use of text data can also provide evidence relevant to the operation of various language processing principles. In particular, an investigation is made of those English complex sentences used to represent two ordered events and containing before or a_fkr subordinate ciauses. Following an analysis of the frequency, position and information distribution of each such structure from some 1331 pages of running text from three different sources, it is argued that the selection of the forms and their distributions in the texts results from the employment of certain syntactic and discourse constraints. It is shown that the GIVENNEW constraint is satisfied across all the texts, while the other, more local, ORDER OF EVENTS and MAIN-SUBORDINATE constraints tend to be associated to a greater or lesser degree with the less formal, more oral type of writing. It is concluded that text evidence is directly relevant to an understanding of language processing.

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