This paper examines the relationship between heaviness and optional movement to the edge of a clause - demonstrating how a digitized and syntactically annotated corpus of historical texts can contribute to the study of phenomena associated with linguistic processing. We focus on so-called weight phenomena in word order variation and find that heaviness draws phrases to both edges of a clause - not just the right edge as sometimes assumed.
This paper examines the relationship between heaviness and optional movement
to the edge of a clause – demonstrating how a digitized and syntactically
annotated corpus of historical texts can contribute to the study of phenomena
associated with linguistic processing. It is a well known observation that
syntactic constituents sometimes appear at the end of a clause rather than in their
canonical position when they are heavy/long; going back to Behagel [
b. I met on the street [my rich uncle from Detroit].
Despite several studies on weight effects, it still remains a matter of investigation
why such movement takes place. Proposed explanations appeal to some aspects
of processing and include that such movement facilitates parsing [
We will not attempt to resolve these big questions. That task goes far beyond the scope of such a short paper. However, we do want to make an empirical point that in our opinion seems to escape attention in some of the most important studies on weight effects. Heaviness is not only positively correlated with movement to the right edge of a clause, but also to the left edge, e.g. by left dislocation (2). (2) a. I forgot about [my rich uncle from Detroit].
b. [My rich uncle from Detroit]1, I forgot about him1.
This is important because it suggests that weight-driven movement is, at least in part, about amending situations where one needs to backtrack from a deeply embedded structure in the middle of an utterance rather than moving to the right.
The paper is organized as follows: In section 2 we discuss the placement of old vs. new/given information in a sentence and the nature of rightward movement. In section 3 we introduce our study and the concept of Edge weight. In section 4 we discuss the results of our study. Section 5 concludes. 2
There is a well-known tendency for syntactic constituents that introduce new information to appear later in the sentence than constituents that present old/given information (see Prince 1981 for her account of definitions of old vs. new information).
Thrainsson (2005:506) argued that in languages such as Icelandic the basic
word order of Subject-Verb-Object does not always agree with the tendency to
present old information before new. As he demonstrates in example (3), both
purposes can be fulfilled by choosing a passive sentence, rather than active.
(3)
The sentences in (3) have more or less the same meaning but offer two ways
of organizing old and new information without violating the rules of syntactic
structure in Icelandic. The tendency for new information to appear at the right
edge of a sentence is also manifested in various exceptions from the Definiteness
Restriction [
Það bilaði bíllinn.
there broke down the.car
‘The car broke down.’
Það er stíflaður vaskurinn.
there is clogged the.sink
‘The sink is clogged.’
The conditions for violating the Definiteness Restriction are, as Jónsson [
‘Why didn’t you use the car to get here?’ B: a. ??Nú, það bilaði bíllinn. well there broke down the.car ‘Well, the car broke down.’ b. Nú, bíllinn bilaði.
well, the.car broke down ‘Well, the car broke down.’
‘What happened?’ B: Það bilaði bíllinn. there broke down the.car ‘The car broke down.’ Bíllinn bilaði. the.car broke down ‘The car broke down.’ Various suggestions have been made to explain why heavy elements can be moved to the right edge of a sentence, whereas lighter elements are not as easily shifted, as demonstrated in example (7). (7) a. ?Stella read [to the children] [a book].
b. Stella read [to the children] [a book about lions and tigers and bears].
One of these suggestions is that it serves the purpose of placing old information
closer to the sentence initial position and new and less predictable information
further to the right [
The question of how syntactic heaviness is best defined will not be addressed in this paper, but whether it be information structure or length and/or complexity, most of these accounts agree that rightward movement of heavy elements is a means of facilitating processing and parsing. The question that remains to be answered is whether heavy elements can only be moved to the right edge of a sentence. The results from our study suggest that leftward-movement may serve the same purpose. 3
Thráinsson described Left Dislocation in Icelandic [
Mary saw priest downtown yesterday ‘Mary saw a priest downtown yesterday.’ b. *[Prestur], María sá [hann] í baenum í gaer.
priest Mary saw him downtown yesterday
Intended: ‘A priest, Mary saw him downtown yesterday.’ c. [Presturinn], María sá [hann] í baenum í gaer.
the.priest Mary saw him downtown yesterday ‘The priest, Mary saw him downtown yesterday.’ The Left-Dislocated constituent is always in the nominative case but the pronominal copy in situ carries the appropriate case.
Prince [
For our study, we searched Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC)for examples of Left-Dislocated Subjects and Direct Objects and Topicalized Direct and Indirect Objects. We compared the average length of the moved constituents vs. the average length of constituents left in situ in each case.
The aim of this study is to demonstrate that heavy syntactic constituents are not only moved to the right edge, as discussed in section 2, but may also be moved to the left edge, e.g. by Left Dislocation or Topicalization.
Or first search was for Subjects moved by Left Dislocation vs Subjects in situ. Or search gave 34191 examples, 193 of which had Left-Dislocated Subjects (such as example (9)) and we found a significant difference in the length between the two. (9) en fiskarnir sem þar inni lifa, þeir eru þó ekki saltir but the fish that there inside life, they are though not salty ‘But the fish that live in there are not salty.’ (ID 1720.VIDALIN.REL-SER,.53)2 2 Examples from the IcePaHC corpus are shown along with their unique tree ID in parentheses. Our search showed that subjects in situ had the average length of : 2,1, whereas Left-Dislocated subjects had the average length of : 9,6, as shown in Fig. 1 (Mann-Whitney U test: U = 77105, p<0.001).
As we see in Fig. 1, Left-Dislocated subjects are not only considerably longer by number of words on average than subjects in situ, they also tend to be very long in general. These results suggest that very long subjects are more likely to be moved out of the main clause by Left Dislocation. The moved subjects would have been on the left edge of the sentence anyway if they hadn’t been moved. We wanted to know what happens with long constituents that are further away from the clause initial position. 4
Our second search was for Direct Objects that have been moved by Left Dislocation, such as example (10). We found 25005 examples, 28 of which had Left Dislocated Objects. (10) [Þau orð] eg tala til yðar þau tala eg ei af sjálfum [those words.acc] I speak to you they speak I not from self mér me ‘The words I speak to you, I speak not from myself’ (ID 1593.EINTAL.REL-OTH,.1039)
Similarly to the left dislocated subjects, we found a significant difference in the average length of left dislocated direct objects ( : 8) and direct objects in situ ( : 2,57) (Mann-Whitney U test: U = 614480, p<0.001).
These search results confirm that both subjects and direct objects that are moved by Left Dislocation tend to be very long and, on average, considerably longer than the ones left in situ.
Our next search was for examples with Topicalized vs. Non-Topicalized constituents. First we looked for Topicalized Direct Objects, like we see in excample (11) vs. Direct Objects in situ. We found 11688 examples, 1070 of which had Topicalized Objects. Our search revealed that Non-Topicalized direct objects tend to be significantly longer ( : 2,6) than Topicalized ones ( : 1,9) (Mann-Whitney U test: U = 5442000, p=0.0128). (11) [Öllum þessum móðgunum] tóku landsmenn með þögn og [All these insults.dat] took countrymen with silence and þolinmaeði patience ‘All these insults countrymen took with silence and patience.’ (ID 1907.LEYSING.NAR-FIC,.521)
Although the length difference is nowhere near as great as in the LeftDislocated examples, it is still significant and, interestingly, it is the opposite to what we’ve previously seen, as the shifted constituents are, in this case, shorter than the constituents in situ.
We hypothesize that this could be explained by the fact that Direct Objects in Icelandic tend to already be located on the right edge (11a), whereas Indirect Objects are usually found in the middle, between the verb and Direct Object (12b). (12) a.
Peter gave [Mary] porridge ‘Peter gave Mary porridge.’ We decided to also search for Topicalized Indirect Objects vs Indirect Objects in situ. Our search gave 2012 examples, out of which 57 had Topicalized Indirect Objects, and it revealed the opposite results to the Direct Objects: that Topicalized indirect objects include a larger number of words ( : 2,6) than those left in situ ( : 1,5a) (Mann-Whitney U test: U = 77105, p<0.001). (13) (14) [Þeim sem við hallardyr sat] gaf hann digran gullhring [They.dat that at palace door sat] gave he thick golden ring ‘Those that sat by the palace door he gave a thick golden ring.’ (ID 1480.JARLMANN.NAR-SAG,.790) ...
To briefly summarize, our main findings were that constituents moved to the left edge by Left Dislocation, Subjects and Direct Objects, tend to be very long (on average they include more than 8 words) and significantly much longer than constituents left in their original place. Topicalized Indirect Objects follow the same pattern, although the average length difference is much smaller, whereas Topicalized Direct Objects are significantly shorter by average number of words than Direct Objects in situ.
From these results we have drawn the following conclusions:
Leftward movement, in particular Left Dislocation, is used to move heavy elements to the left edge of the sentence, similarly to rightward movement.
Heavy elements that are already on the right edge of the sentence do not need to undergo leftward movement, as they are already on an edge.
Heavy elements that are placed in the middle of a sentence may be moved to either the left or right edge, whichever better suited in each case to facilitate grammatical parsing. 5
We found that moving something to the edge can facilitate parsing in cases
where speakers need to recover from a deeply embedded structure in the middle
of a clause. Some more general implications involve the fact that our study
illustrates how digital parsed corpora of historical languages are useful for studying
processing effects. Of course, while our results are already interesting, the effects
needs to be studied in more detail in experiments, taking into account other
variables and painting a clearer picture of how similar heaviness-driven leftward
movement is to heaviness-driven rightward movement. A further avenue of future
inquiry is to explore in more detail the relationship between Left Dislocation and
Topicalization in the light of analyses such as the one presented by Prince. [
The main point here to show that movement to both edges is associated with heaviness, not just to the right edge. Understanding what exactly the parsing problem is is a bigger problem for a bigger research program. However, it intuitively seems on the surface that both types of movement to the edge, i.e., to the left and right, amend some kind of a processing difficulty – and that moving heavy elements to the edge can sometimes ameliorate the situation.