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Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2019). Mutual attraction between high-frequency verbs and clause types with finite verbs in early positions: Corpus evidence from spoken English, Dutch, and German. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(9), 1140-1151. doi:10.1080/23273798.2019.1642498.
Abstract
We report a hitherto unknown statistical relationship between the corpus frequency of finite verbs and their fixed linear positions (early vs. late) in finite clauses of English, Dutch, and German. Compared to the overall frequency distribution of verb lemmas in the corpora, high-frequency finite verbs are overused in main clauses, at the expense of nonfinite verbs. This finite versus nonfinite split of high-frequency verbs is basically absent from subordinate clauses. Furthermore, this “main-clause bias” (MCB) of high-frequency verbs is more prominent in German and Dutch (SOV languages) than in English (an SVO language). We attribute the MCB and its varying effect sizes to faster accessibility of high-frequency finite verbs, which (1) increases the probability for these verbs to land in clauses mandating early verb placement, and (2) boosts the activation of clause plans that assign verbs to early linear positions (in casu: clauses with SVO as opposed to SOV order).Additional information
plcp_a_1642498_sm1530.pdf -
Kempen, G. (2004). Terug naar Wundt: Pleidooi voor integraal onderzoek van taal, taalkennis en taalgedrag. In Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (
Ed. ), Gij letterdames en gij letterheren': Nieuwe mogelijkheden voor taalkundig en letterkundig onderzoek in Nederland. (pp. 174-188). Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2004). A corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of grammatical function assignment. In T. Pechmann, & C. Habel (
Eds. ), Multidisciplinary approaches to language production (pp. 173-181). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2004). Generating natural word orders in a semi-free word order language: Treebank-based linearization preferences for German. In A. Gelbukh (
Ed. ), Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (pp. 350-354). Berlin: Springer.Abstract
We outline an algorithm capable of generating varied but natural sounding sequences of argument NPs in subordinate clauses of German, a semi-free word order language. In order to attain the right level of output flexibility, the algorithm considers (1) the relevant lexical properties of the head verb (not only transitivity type but also reflexivity, thematic relations expressed by the NPs, etc.), and (2) the animacy and definiteness values of the arguments, and their length. The relevant statistical data were extracted from the NEGRA–II treebank and from hand-coded features for animacy and definiteness. The algorithm maps the relevant properties onto “primary” versus “secondary” placement options in the generator. The algorithm is restricted in that it does not take into account linear order determinants related to the sentence’s information structure and its discourse context (e.g. contrastiveness). These factors may modulate the above preferences or license “tertiary” linear orders beyond the primary and secondary options considered here. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2004). How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses? A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity. In S. Kepser, & M. Reis (
Eds. ), Pre-Proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence (pp. 81-85). Tübingen: Niemeyer. -
Kempen, G. (2004). Interactive visualization of syntactic structure assembly for grammar-intensive first- and second-language instruction. In R. Delmonte, P. Delcloque, & S. Tonelli (
Eds. ), Proceedings of InSTIL/ICALL2004 Symposium on NLP and speech technologies in advanced language learning systems (pp. 183-186). Venice: University of Venice. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2004). How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses?: A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence (pp. 81-85). Tübingen: University of Tübingen.
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Kempen, G. (2004). Human grammatical coding: Shared structure formation resources for grammatical encoding and decoding. In Cuny 2004 - The 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March 25-27, 2004. University of Maryland (pp. 66).
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