Word order preferences and the effect of phrasal length in SOV languages: evidence from sentence production in Persian

Abstract

Heaviness (or phrasal length) has been shown to trigger mirror-image constituent ordering preferences in head-initial and head-final languages (heavy-late vs. heavy-first). These preferences are commonly attributed to a general cognitive pressure for processing efficiency obtained by minimizing the overall head-dependents linear distance-measured as the distance between the verb and the head of its left/right-most complement (Hawkins's Minimizing Domains) or as the sum of the distances between the verb and its complements (Dependency Length Minimization). The alternative language-specific accessibility-based production account, that considers longer constituents to be conceptually more accessible and views heavy-first as a salient-first preference, is dismissed because it implies differential sentence production in SOV and SVO languages. This paper studies the effect of phrasal length in Persian, a flexible SOV language displaying mixed head direction and differential object marking. We investigated the effect of linear distance as well as the effect of conceptual enrichment in two sentence production experiments. Our results provide clear evidence that support DLM while undermining Hawkins's MiD. However, they also show that some length effects cannot be captured by a dependency-distance-minimizing model and the conceptual accessibility hypothesis also needs to be taken into account to explain ordering preferences in Persian. Importantly, our findings indicate that distance minimization has a less strong effect in Persian than previously shown for other SOV languages.

Do Speakers Minimize Dependency Length during Naturalistic Dialogue?

“…This can schematically be seen in Figure 3. Evidence for a long-before-short preference has been found from production experiments in SOV languages (Yamashita and Chang, 2001;Ros et al, 2015;Faghiri and Samvelian, 2020). For example, in Japanese sentences 1a-1b, consisting of a short subject and a long object, Yamashita and Chang (2001) found that speakers produced more noncanonical (OSV) order sentences like 1b than the canonical (SOV) like 1a.…”

Word Order Variation is Partially Constrained by Syntactic Complexity

“…The hypothesis that longer dependents are preferentially placed in the periphery is primarily motivated by more general observations of dependency length minimization (DLM) (Ferrer i Cancho, 2004; Futrell et al., 2020; Gibson, 1998, 2000; Jing, Blasi, & Bickel, in press; Liu, 2008; Temperley, 2008). The core finding of DLM research is that speakers seek to minimize the total length of dependencies in a given structure because this reduces pressure on working memory and keeps adjacent information that belongs together (Choi, 2007; Faghiri & Samvelian, 2014, 2020; Futrell et al., 2020; Gibson et al., 2019; Hawkins, 1994; Ros, Santesteban, Fukumura, & Laka, 2015; Yamashita, 2002; Yamashita & Chang, 2001). One specific effect of this bears on the peripheral placement of long dependents: when dependents occur on the same side of their head, placing the shortest dependent closest to the verb reduces the total length of dependencies.…”