Re: Right-Branching vs. Left-Branching

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 10:39:51 -0700, Heather Fleming <hfleming@PLANET-
SAVE.COM> wrote:

>I can't think of any studies off the top of my head. It's probably true
>that right-branching sentences are easier for English speakers to parse.
>But saying that right-branching is inherently easier across the board...
>I don't know. I would agree that it seems a bit odd, considering, as you
>say, the sheer volume of SOV (left-branching) languages (I think that SOV
>and SVO are roughly equally represented if I recall correctly. I'm not
>sure which one is actually more common). But then, I think there's at
>least one school of thought that says all languages are really SVO if you
>get down far enough.
SOV word-order, at least in declarative sentences, is the largest syntactic
type in the world.  I think SVO languages, many of which are Indo-European,
are over-represented due to their widespreadness (new word?).  If we remove
such biases, SOV clearly comes out on top.

Rick Morneau's "Lexical Semantics"
(http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/lexical_semantics.html) or one of his other
articles is where I read that right-branching syntax is inherently easier
for people and computers to parse.  However, I noticed that this flies in
the face of evidence that a majority of the world's languages are SOV.  I
mean, if VSO syntax was inherently easier to parse, one would think that
VSO would be the largest syntactic category.  But it isn't.

>Early linguistics: all languages are essentially just like Latin.
>Chomskyan linguistics: all languages are essentially just like English, if
>you build enough trees and diagrams and explain them in complicated enough
>terms.
>
>:)
LOL.  I'm hardly a professional linguist (!), but it seems that Chomsky has
added a lot of techno-jumbo (another new word/phrase?) to that science.

- Rob

Reply