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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 24:4 (2019) ► pp.490–521

Investigating the additive probability of repeated language production decisions

| Survey of English Usage, UCL

This paper introduces an experimental paradigm based on probabilistic evidence of the interaction between construction decisions in a parsed corpus. The approach is demonstrated using ICE-GB, a one million-word corpus of English. It finds an interaction between attributive adjective phrases in noun phrases with a noun head, such that the probability of adding adjective phrases falls successively. The same pattern is much weaker in adverbs preceding a verb phrase, implying this decline is not a universal phenomenon. Noun phrase postmodifying clauses exhibit a similar initial fall in the probability of successive clauses modifying the same NP head, and embedding clauses modifying new NP heads. Successive postmodification shows a secondary phenomenon of an increase in additive probability in longer sequences, apparently due to ‘templating’ effects. The author argues that these results can only be explained as cognitive and communicative natural phenomena acting on and within recursive grammar rules.

Keywords: additive probability, interaction evidence, language production, parsing, grammar evaluation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Syntactic annotation in corpus linguistics
    • 2.1Criteria for selecting and evaluating frameworks
    • 2.2Retrievability of linguistic events
    • 2.3Retrievability of patterns of interaction
  • 3.Three experiments with attributive adjectives in noun phrases
    • 3.1Experiment 1: Attributive adjective phrases
    • 3.2Experiment 2: Attributive adjective phrases with proper and common noun heads
    • 3.3Experiment 3: Attributive adjectives, without parsing
  • 4.Experiment 4: Grammatical interaction between preverbal adverb phrases
  • 5.Experiment 5: Grammatical interaction in postmodifying clauses
    • 5.1Sequential postmodification
    • 5.2Embedded postmodification
    • 5.3Alternative explanations
    • 5.4Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
    • 6.1Implications for corpus linguistics
    • 6.2Towards the evaluation of grammar
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17093.wal
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