Abstract
Based on samples from two corpora, we found that Chinese objects tend to be much shorter than English objects, and that unlike in English, Chinese subjects and objects tend to have similar lengths when their information status is controlled. These differences can be explained in terms of a universal need for dependency distance minimization (DDM), reflecting different strategies of sentence organization to meet the universal constraint of working memory. These DDM-driven syntactic diversities may be irrelevant to grammaticality, but contribute to the smoothness of sentences, because they are shaped by the universal need to reduce the cognitive burden during comprehension. It is perhaps in these common cognitive and functional constraints that we are to find true language universals, universals embodied in linguistic diversity.
摘要
对来自两个语料库的样本进行了研究之后, 我们发现汉语的宾语长度往往比英语的宾语要短, 而且与英语不同, 当信息状态 (上下文已知度) 这个变量被控制之后, 汉语主语和宾语的长度变得相似。这些差异可以用依存距离最小化来解释, 反映了英语和汉语不同的句子组织策略, 但是目的都是为了满足共同的工作记忆约束。这些由 DDM (依存距离最小化) 驱动的句法多样性可能与句子是否合乎无关, 但有助于提升句子的流畅度, 因为它们都可以减轻句子理解过程中人的认知负担。也许正是在这些共同的认知和功能约束中, 我们才能找到真正的、体现在语言多样性中的语言普遍性。
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