The effects of genre on dependency distance and dependency direction

Abstract Dependency distance, the distance between words linked in a syntactic dependency, has been a key measure of interest in cross-linguistic corpus work, because it is hypothesized to reflect working memory demands during sentence processing. However, previous work has not systematically investigated the effects of text genre on dependency distance in English. We might expect spoken language to have shorter dependencies and informative technical language to have longer dependencies than do fiction and imaginative language. The current study uses quantitative methods to explore the distribution of dependency distance in English across genres controlled for sentence length. Ten genres of English from the British National Corpus provided the data source. The results show that 1) The distributions of dependency distances across all sentence lengths and genres follow the same parametric distributions. 2) Genre affects adjacent dependency rate significantly, but its effect is very small. 3) Sentence length and genre effect dependency distance significantly, but the effect is small. We find shorter dependencies in written-to-be-spoken texts, and longer dependencies in the imaginative genre than those in the informative genres. 4) Genre effects dependency direction significantly, but again the effect is small. Overall the results suggest that the effect of genre on these dependency measures is small, suggesting that dependency distance is primarily determined by universal cognitive factors rather than genre-specific stylistic factors.

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