Modeling the Noun Phrase versus Sentence Coordination Ambiguity in Dutch: Evidence from Surprisal Theory
Year: 2010
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This paper investigates whether surprisal theory can account for differential processing difficulty in the NP-/S-coordination ambiguity in Dutch.Surprisal is estimated using a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG), which is induced from an automatically annotated corpus.We find that our lexicalized surprisal model can account for the reading time data from a classic experiment on this ambiguity by Frazier (1987).We argue that syntactic and lexical probabilities, as specified in a PCFG, are sufficient to account for what is commonly referred to as an NP-coordination preference.
Source: Max Planck Digital Library
Authors: Harm Brouwer, Hartmut Fitz, John Hoeks
Institution: University of Groningen
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2133491969