Minimalist Parsing of Heavy NP Shift

Minimalist Parsing of Heavy NP Shift Lei Liu Stony Brook University lei.liu.1@stonybrook.edu Abstract This paper studies Heavy NP Shift (HNPS) from the perspective of parsing using Min- imalist Grammar. Based on memory usage of the MG parsers, processing difficulties of HNPS as derived by rightward movement, PP movement and remnant movement are each compared with a non-movement structure. A set of complexity metrics show that shifted structures are indeed easier to parse than a non-movement structure when the NP is long. 1 Introduction Heavy NP Shift (HNPS) refers to the tendency that long or phonologically “heavy” phrases are shifted to positions other than where they canonically occur. An English HNPS sentence is shown in (1a). (1) a. Max put [PP in his car] [NP all the boxes of home furnishings]. (Larson 2014) b. Max put [NP all the boxes of home fur- nishings] [PP in his car]. c. ??Max put [PP in his car] [NP boxes]. The canonically word-ordered or “unshifted” ver- sion of (1a) is the sentence in (1b). When the object NP is short, however, shifted word order is marked, as shown in (1c). Popular analyses of HNPS include: rightward movement of NP (Ross 1986), where the heavy NP moves to the right edge of the constituent; the PP movement analysis (Kayne 1994), where the PP left- ward moves; and the remnant movement analysis (Rochemont and Culicover 1997), where the heavy NP moves first, followed by movement of the “rem- nant” VP. The above analyses are schematized in (2- 4) respectively. (2) Maxput t inhiscar<put>all...furnishings. (3) Maxput all...furnishings<put>inhiscar (4) Maxput [all...furnishings]<put>inhiscar These syntactic analyses, distinct as they are, are equally successful in deriving the English HNPS word order. However, since structural properties of a sentence predicts how hard it is for humans to process it, it is unclear what processing predictions these analyses make, nor is it clear whether these predictions are born out in observed human process- ing preferences. Psycholinguistic studies on human sentence pro- cessing have shown that sentences with HNPS word order are preferred in production over the canoni- cal word order when the NP is long (Stallings et al. 1998). Additionally, it has been observed that the likelihood of shifting heavy NPs relates not only to the length of NPs, but of PPs as well. As the length of a PP increases, i.e., as the length difference be- tween the NP and the VP decreases, HNPS is less likely to happen (Stallings and MacDonald 2011). It is then interesting to explore whether and how well these psycholinguistic findings are predicted by a given structural analysis. Minimalist Grammar (MG) parsing (Stabler 2013, Graf et al. 2017) provides a quantitative way PACLIC 32 404 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 by the author to answer precisely these questions. As it will hope- fully become clear, It is possible to infer and com- pare processing difficulties that associate with syn- tactic structures by observing the parser’s behavior …

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