We report an eye movement experiment investigating the influence of the focus operator only on syntactic processing of "long" relative clause sentences. Paterson, Liversedge, and Underwood (1999) found that readers were garden pathed by "short" reduced relative clause sentences containing the focus operator only. They argued that due to thematic differences between "short" and "long" relative c...

In this paper we present a corpus study and a sentence completion experiment designed to evaluate the discourse prominence of entities evoked in relative clauses. The corpus study shows a preference for referring expressions after a sentence final relative clause to select a matrix clause entity as their antecedents. In the sentence completion experiment, we evaluated the potential effect of he...

Contrastively focused constituents in Malagasy, a verb-initial language, occur at the left edge of the clause, separated from the remainder of the clause by the particle no (previous work has shown that no forms a constituent with what follows it, here called the NO-PHRASE). The Malagasy focus construction is usually analyzed as a pseudo-cleft: the focus phrase constitutes the main predicate of...

Information-theoretic complexity metrics, such as Surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and Entropy Reduction 2003), are linking hypotheses that bridge theorized expectations about sentences observed processing difficulty in comprehension. These can be viewed syntactic derivations constrained by a grammar. However, this expectation-based view is not limited to information alone. The present study ...

Relativization is a robust subordinating type across languages, displaying important typological variability concerning the position of nominal head that relative clause modifies, and sign languages are no exception. It has been widely assumed since Keenan & Comrie (1977) subject more accessible to relativization than object oblique positions. The main aim this paper investigate extensi...

Broadly speaking, subject relative clauses are easier to understand than object relative clauses (Wanner & Maratsos, 1978, Ford, 1983, Holmes & O'Regan, 1981, among many others). This can be demonstrated by a variety of methods that measure the speed and accuracy with which sentences containing relative clauses are processed. As an example, compare (1a), which contains a subject relative clause...