In relative clause extraposition (RCE) in English, a noun is modified by a non-adjacent RC, resulting in a discontinuous dependency, as in: Three people arrived here yesterday who were from Chicago. Although discourse focus is known to influence the choice of RCE over truth-conditionally equivalent sentences with canonical structure (Rochemont and Culicover, English focus constructions and the theory of grammar, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Takami, A functional constraint on Extraposition from NP, John Benjamins, 1999), Hawkins (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004) and Wasow (Postverbal behavior, CSLI Publications, 2002) have proposed in addition that RCE should be preferred when the relative clause is long (or ‘heavy’) relative to the VP because such structures are processed more efficiently in comprehension and production. The current study tested this hypothesis based on Hawkins' (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004) domain minimization principles. In an acceptability judgment task, canonical sentences were rated significantly higher than extraposition sentences when the RC was light, but this difference disappeared when the RC was heavy. In a self-paced reading task, extraposition sentences were read significantly faster than canonical sentences when the RC was heavy, but there was no difference when the RC was light. In an analysis of RCE in the ICE-GB corpus, extraposed RCs were significantly longer than the VP on average, whereas canonical RCs were significantly shorter, and the proportion of sentences with extraposition decreased as the ratio of VP-to-RC length increased. These findings support Hawkins' (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004) domain minimization principles and help explain why a discontinuous dependency is allowed and sometimes preferred even in a language with relatively fixed word order.

Purpose The present study examines the impact of typical aging and Parkinson’s disease (PD) on the relationship among breath pausing, syntax, and punctuation. Methods Thirty young adults, 25 typically aging older adults, and 15 individuals with PD participated. Fifteen participants were age- and sex-matched to the individuals with PD. Participants read a passage aloud two times. Utterance length, location of breath pauses relative to punctuation and syntax, and number of disfluencies and mazes were measured. Results Older adults produced shorter utterances, a smaller percentage of breaths at major boundaries, and a greater percentage of breaths at minor boundaries than young adults, but there was no significant difference between older adults and individuals with PD on these measures. Individuals with PD took a greater percentage of breaths at locations unrelated to a syntactic boundary than control participants. Individuals with PD produced more mazes than control participants. Breaths were significantly correlated with punctuation for all groups. Conclusions Changes in breath pausing patterns in older adults are likely due to changes in respiratory physiology. However, in individuals with PD, such changes appear to result from a combination of changes to respiratory physiology and cognition.

Examining four constructions in three languages (English quantificational nouns, Japanese subordinating conjunctions, Cantonese coverbs, Japanese deverbal postpositions), this paper shows that semantic properties can change faster than syntactic properties in gradual processes of grammaticalization. In each of these cases, the syntactic properties of one category become associated with the semantic properties of a different category when an item undergoes semantic change, leading to the appearance of mixed categorial properties. We propose that this sort of change is best captured using a multi-modular framework (Sadock 1991, Yuasa 2005), which allows changes to affect semantics independently of syntax, and which shows clearly that the relevant items and constructions still conform to the separate structural constraints of syntax and semantics, despite the unusual combination of properties. These findings are important for theories of grammaticalization because they suggest that the cover term ‘decategorialization’ (the loss of grammatical properties associated with the source category) must be understood in terms of at least two separate processes: (1) the effects of semantic change on an item's distribution; and (2) the effects of frequency (Bybee & Hopper 2001) and Pressure for Structure–Concept Iconicity (Newmeyer 1998) on an item's syntactic categorization. Our case studies show that the first kind of decategorialization effects can occur even in the absence of the second kind. Implications of these findings, including possible reasons for both the instability and the long-term retention of mismatch constructions, are also considered.

In relative clause extraposition (RCE) in English, a subject-modifying relative clause is displaced to a position following the verb phrase, as in Some research was conducted that supports the existing theory. Previous studies have revealed that both grammatical weight (i.e. relative constituent length) and discourse factors are important for determining when and why speakers use RCE. However, the current study is the first to examine the interaction of these factors. A quantitative analysis of RCE and comparable non-RCE tokens in the International Corpus of English Great Britain (ICE-GB) showed a strong effect of grammatical weight: there was a strong preference for RCE when the relative clause was at least five times longer than the verb phrase, and a strong preference for canonical (non-RCE) order when the relative clause was the same length or shorter than the verb phrase. However, for those tokens with length ratios falling in between these limits, choice of structure appeared to depend primarily on discourse factors. Tokens with an indefinite subject NP and a passive or presentative main verb were much more likely to contain RCE than were tokens with other combinations of features. In addition, RCE was more likely with discourse-accessible predicates than with new predicates. In short, it appears that the selection of RCE versus a canonical structure involves the joint satisfaction of processing-based goals and discourse-based goals, rather than meeting one set of aims at the expense of the other: length ratio sets soft limits on RCE based on ease of processing, while discourse factors regulate choice of structure within these limits. same maximal projection as its head. Most syntactic accounts of RCE have avoided positing an actual discontinuous constituent (but see McCawley 1987), instead licensing RCE through rightward movement (Ross 1967, Baltin 1981), leftward movement (Kayne 1994), or adjunction and co-indexing (Culicover and Rochemont 1990). Nevertheless, this kind of dependency relation adds complexity to the syntax, as confirmed by the experimental findings of Levy et al. (2012), who show that in the absence of any facilitating cues, RCE sentences are more difficult for readers to process than non-RCE sentences. For example, one experiment showed that for sentences like (2), reading times were slower in the first four words of the relative clause (bracketed below) for RCE sentences, as compared with non-RCE sentences. (2) After the show, a performer came on [who had really impressed] the audience and everyone went wild with applause. (Levy et al 2012: 17) Further, unlike many other constructions featuring non-canonical word order, such as whmovement and topicalization, RCE has no obvious functional motivation. Given the added complexity of RCE, and its apparent lack of semantico-pragmatic effect, one can reasonably ask why speakers use the construction. The literature has provided two main answers. The first answer, which the majority of the studies have provided, is that RCE is used to place prese...

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