Information Density and Syntactic Repetition

Cognitive Science 39 (8):1802-1823 (2015)
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Abstract

In noun phrase coordinate constructions, there is a strong tendency for the syntactic structure of the second conjunct to match that of the first; the second conjunct in such constructions is therefore low in syntactic information. The theory of uniform information density predicts that low-information syntactic constructions will be counterbalanced by high information in other aspects of that part of the sentence, and high-information constructions will be counterbalanced by other low-information components. Three predictions follow: lexical probabilities will be lower in second conjuncts than first conjuncts; lexical probabilities will be lower in matching second conjuncts than nonmatching ones; and syntactic repetition should be especially common for low-frequency NP expansions. Corpus analysis provides support for all three of these predictions

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