Recursion introduces a left-branching bias (where possible)

Abstract

Capitalizing upon the recursive nature of Saxon Genitives in English, this note examines the constituent structure of double Saxon Genitives such as ( he took) my sister-in-law's child's life. An analysis of 200 cases from both the spoken and the written modality reveals a distribution of 70% left branching and 30% right branching. This left-branching bias exists in the face of a general rightbranching preference in English. It is argued that left branching stems from the recursive structure of the Saxon Genitive. As listeners and readers take in the acoustic signal, they apply probabilistic decoding strategies and expect the more frequent nonrecursive Saxon Genitive to come up. Thus, the first two lexemes are treated as sister constituents. This introduces an advantage for left branching because such a configuration can be easily expanded into a double Saxon Genitive. By contrast, a right-branching structure leads the listener up the garden path. Branching direction in double Saxon Genitives is also found to be influenced by the animacy of their constituents. An animate possessor amplifies the left-branching bias whereas an inanimate possessor increases the incidence of right branching.

Branching direction in recursive structures

“…This result is in harmony with a previous investigation of recursive Saxon genitives (Berg 2011). Although there are almost twice as many left-branching cases in the spoken than in the written sample, this difference turns out to be non-significant (X 2 (1) = 2.2, p > 0.1).…”

“…In a previous study by Berg (2011), recursive Saxon genitives were found to be susceptible to both left-and right-branching, as exemplified in (9) and (10) from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. On a more theoretical level, it will be of interest to identify the factors that underlie this frequency distribution.…”

“…Berg (2011) demonstrated that these form a heterogeneous set. Berg (2011) demonstrated that these form a heterogeneous set.…”

“…This result contrasts sharply with the general right-branching nature of the English language (Berg 2012). Berg (2011) proposes a perceptually driven frequency account for this asymmetry. The starting point is the left-to-right nature of speech.…”

Adjective phrases with doubly modified heads: how lexical information influences word order and constituent structure

“…This combined approach allows us to examine branching direction and ordering preferences in different types of ADJPs. From a broader perspective, this study can be viewed as an extension of previous corpus work on morphological structures (Berg 2003) to the syntactic level (see also Berg 2011). This seems all the more desirable as quantitative syntactic investigations of branching direction are at a premium.…”