Redundancy and Syntactic Reduction
This is a series of corpus-based studies and production experiments on syntactic reduction and too what extent it is driven by redundancy/information density/predictability.
More information on some of our projects on syntactic reductions:
- We have conducted corpus studies and experiments on the syntactic reduction of non-subject-extracted relative clauses:
for corpus studies of speech and writing, see Jaeger (2006 -- my thesis) and [http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/papers/WasowJaegerOrrDGfSpaper.pdf Wasow et al. (2009)].
we have also been running [wiki:/ORCreductionExperiments recall, completion, and forced-choice preference experiments on that-omission in object-extracted relative clauses] in collaboration with Roger Levy and Vic Ferreira at UCSD.
for the syntactic reduction of complement clauses, see [http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/papers/Jaeger09UIDcomplementizers.pdf Jaeger (submitted)].
[wiki:/SRCreduction Reduction of subject-extracted relative clauses] (so called whiz-deletion). Also, feel free to have a look at the [wiki:/Annotation annotation guidelines for the studies on subject-extracted passive relative clauses in the British National Corpus].
Tom Wasow also has done some studies on that-omission in subject-extracted relative clauses in non-standard English (not the same as whiz-deletion), which are summarized in the presentation we gave at the International Relative Conference, Cambridge, September 2007.
Finally, I have some preliminary data on to-omission after the verb help in English, which I presented in some invited talks. Let me know if you want more information.