Word Order Doesn't Matter: Relative Clause Production in English and Japanese

Word Order Doesn’t Matter: Relative Clause Production in English and Japanese Jessica L. Montag (montag@wisc.edu) Department of Psychology, 1202 W. Johnson Street Madison, WI 53706 USA Maryellen C. MacDonald (mcmacdonald@wisc.edu) Department of Psychology, 1202 W. Johnson Street Madison, WI 53706 USA Abstract Comparatively little is known about how semantic properties (such as animacy) and syntactic properties (such as word order) affect production of complex sentences. Relative clauses were elicited using a picture description task that manipulated head noun animacy in both English (which has head-first relative clauses and Japanese (head-final relative clauses). Participants of both languages produced more passive relatives with animate than inanimate heads, suggesting that a common underlying production constraint motivates structure choice. Different proportions of passive relatives with inanimate heads across languages suggest a role for both cognitive constrains as well as language-specific patters as factors that affect structure choice in language production. Keywords: language production; relative clauses; animacy; cross-linguistic studies Introduction When turning thoughts into language, a speaker can express a single non-linguistic idea with different lexical choices (couch vs. sofa) and different sentence structures, such as active sentences (The cat scratched the sofa) or passive sentences (The sofa was scratched by the cat). In many cases, speakers implicitly make structure choices in order to make the planning and production process easier (V. Ferreira & Dell, 2000). For example, speakers appear to plan their utterances to allow more “accessible” or salient nouns to be placed earlier in the utterance. This arrangement allows words that are more fully planned to be uttered earlier, leaving more planning time for longer or more complicated nouns later in the sentence. On this view, syntactic structure of an utterance is not a deliberate decision but is rather a consequence of these noun ordering choices (Bock, 1982). Primed nouns (Bock, 1986, 1987) and given versus new nouns in English (Bock & Irwin, 1980), Spanish (Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000) and Japanese (V. Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003) as well as animacy, with animate nouns being more accessible than inanimate nouns (F. Ferreira, 1994; McDonald, Bock & Kelly, 1993) have all been identified as factors that affect noun accessibility and therefore noun ordering of speakers’ sentence structure. While it is clear that noun accessibility correctly predicts active versus passive word order in simple sentences (Bock 1982, 1986, 1987; F. Ferreira 1994), relative clause sentences such as (1-2) are interesting because the head noun (ball, baby) is necessarily fixed as the first noun in both active relative clauses (also called object relative clauses, 1a and 2a) and also in passive relative clauses (1b, 2b). Thus, whereas structure choices between actives and passives in simple sentences vary with the order of the agent and patient nouns, in these relative clauses, the noun order does not vary in the active and passive relative clause forms. Thus any preferences for active vs. passive relative clause forms that vary with animacy may not be ascribed purely to noun ordering. 1a. Active: The ball (that) the woman is holding. b. Passive: The ball (that is) being held by the woman. 2a. Active: The baby (that/who) the woman is holding. b. Passive: The baby (that/who is) being held by the woman. Interestingly, there do appear to be effects of noun animacy on relative clause structure. Gennari and MacDonald (2009) used a phrase based production task and found that both the animacy of the head noun and of the agent of the action (e.g., woman) affected structure choice in relative clauses, but they did not examine inanimate headed relatives such as those in (1). Gennari and MacDonald interpreted their animacy results in terms of accessibility affecting assignment to grammatical roles. In simple sentences, where more accessible nouns become grammatical subjects and are thus uttered first, similar accessibility constraints exist as in relative clauses and similarly affect sentence structure by encouraging more accessible nouns to assume the role of the grammatical subject. This animacy effect in relative clauses is particularly interesting in light of Japanese which is grammatically very different than English. Japanese is a head-final language, which means that the head noun of a relative clause is the final element of the relative clause. Thus, the head noun, which as the sentential topic is arguably the most accessible noun, is produced last. Even with this profound structural difference, Japanese object relative clauses can also occur as either active object relative or passive relative clauses. As in English there is no noun order change between the active and passive relative clause forms, but unlike the English, examples in (1-2), Japanese active and passive relative clauses have identical order across all words of the relative clause. The only difference between the active and the passive forms is the case marker after the embedded noun (woman) and the addition of the passive verb suffix. Some examples can be