Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 29, Issue 2, July 1988, Pages 95-141
Cognition

The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90034-0Get rights and content

Abstract

A rich variety of factors have been proposed as possible determinants of differences in the ease of processing of relative clauses. These determinants include the grammatical role of the head, the shape of surface order configurations the occurence of interruptions of the main clause, and the presence or absence of morphological cues. The strict SVO word order of English makes it so that subject-modifying relatives necessarily interrupt the main clause, thus confounding the effects of role and interruption determinants. Hungarian, with its variable word order, allows us to achieve a somewhat better understanding of the separate effects of roles, configurations, interruptions, and morphological cues. A study using 144 different restrictive relative clause patterns in Hungarian provided evidence for the importance of three determinants of relative clause processing. First, the importance of perspective maintenance was indicated by the fact that SS sentences were the easiest to process and that SO were the most difficult. Second, the extreme difficulty subjects had in processing NNV sentences with a relative clause modifying the second noun indicated the importance of limits on fragment construction of chunks in a bottom-up parsing process. The use of antecedent tagging to mark extraposed relatives in SOV languages with variable order such as Hungarian and Georgian also indicated the importance of limits on fragment construction. Third, the conflict between focusing in the relative clause and focusing in the main clause indicated the importance of focus maintenance. A variety of other proposed determinants were found to be of little importance in accounting for the processing of relative clauses in Hungarian.

Résumé

Un grand ensemble de facteurs ont été avancés comme pouvant expliquer des différences dans le traitement des phrases relatives. Parmi ces facteurs, on trouve: le rôle grammatical de la téte de la phrase relative, l'ordre de surface des constituants, l'existence d'interruptions de la phrase principale, et l'existence ou non d'indications morphologiques. Comme l'anglais posséde un ordre strictement SVO, les relatives qui modifient le sujet de la principale interrompent nécessairement celle-ci, et par conséquent il est impossible de séparer les effets dûs au rôle grammatical et aux interruptions. Le hongrois, dont l'ordre des mots est variable, permet de mieux distinguer l'effet du rôle grammatical, des configurations, des interruptions et des indications morphologiques. Une étude basée sur 144 types de relatives en hongrois suggére que trois facteurs jouent un rôle important dans le traitement des relatives. Premiérement, l'importance de la conservation de la perspective est démontrée par le fait que les phrases SS sont les plus faciles á traiter, et les phrases SO les plus difficiles. Deuxiémement, la grande difficulté de traitement des phrases NNV, où la relative modifie le second substantif, démontre les limitations importantes du processus de construction de fragments par une analyse syntaxique “bottom-up”. L'existence d'un marquage de l'antécédent pour les relatives extraposées dans le cas de langues SOV avec ordre des mots variable comme le hongrois et le géorgien, est une autre indication des limitations importantes que conanait la construction de fragments. Troisiémement, le conflit qui apparait entre une phrase relative focalisée et une phrase principale focalisée montre que la conservation du focus joue un rôle important. Un ensemble d'autres facteurs auxquels on attribute souvent un rôle dans le traitement des relatives ne semblent pas avoir d'influence sur le traitement des relatives en hongrois.

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    This research was carried out with support from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and from the Hungarian Ministry of Education. Our thanks to Kamilla Boda for help in running the experiments.

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