A Non-local Attachment Preference in the Production and Comprehension of ThaiRelative Clauses

A Non-local Attachment Preference in the Production and Comprehension of Thai Relative Clauses Teeranoot Siriwittayakorn Edson T. Miyamoto Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, University of Tsukuba, Graduate School of Chulalongkorn University, Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsukuba, Phayathai Road, Pathumwan, Ibaraki, 305-8571, Japan Bangkok, 10330, Thailand steeranoot@gmail.com Theeraporn Ratitamkul Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Phayathai Road, Pathumwan, Bangkok, 10330, Thailand Theeraporn.R@chula.ac.th miyamoto@alum.mit.edu Heeyoun Cho College English Program, Faculty of Liberal Education, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea heeyoun.cho@gmail.com Abstract In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent one.� Instances of adjacency violation pose a challenge to researchers but also an opportunity to better understand how people process sentences and to improve parsing algorithms by, for example, suggesting new features that can be used in machine learning. We report corpus counts and reading-time data for Thai to investigate an adjacency violation that has been reported in other languages for ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns, namely, the local noun (which is adjacent to the relative clause) or the non-local noun (which is farther from the relative clause). The results indicate that, unlike English, Thai violates adjacency by favoring non-local attachment even though the two languages share many grammatical features that have been linked to a local-attachment preference (e.g., rigid SVO word order). We re- interpret previous proposals to suggest that a language favors the non-local noun if it passes at least one of two tests. (1) Modifiers can intervene between noun and relative clause. (2) Adverbs can intervene between transitive verb and direct object. 1 Introduction We investigated the role of locality (or proximity) in processing decisions by comparing two languages (Thai and English) that have evolved largely independently but share grammatical features that have been claimed to be crucial in sentence comprehension. A preference to associate words locally has been reported at least since the 1970s (Kimball, 1973; Gibson, 1998; inter alia). For example, in (1), the underlined relative clause (RC) can be attached to the non-local noun (N1, daughter) or to the local noun (N2, colonel). (1) The journalist interviewed the daughter of the colonel who had the accident. English readers prefer the RC to modify N2, whereas N1 is preferred in the corresponding construction in Spanish (Cuetos and Mitchell, 1988). Various typological differences have been used to predict which languages violate locality by favoring N1 in such complex NPs (i.e., N1 of N2 RC). (2) A language L favors N1 attachment if: PACLIC 28 575 Copyright 2014 by Teeranoot Siriwittayakorn, Edson T. Miyamoto, Theeraporn Ratitamkul, and Heeyoun Cho 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 575–584 a. L has no alternative construction for expressing the N1 interpretation (Frazier and Clifton, 1996); b. L has flexible word order (Gibson et al., 1996); c. L allows constituents (e.g., adverbs) to intervene between a verb and its direct object (Miyamoto, 1999); d. L exhibits consistent use of relative pronouns …

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