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. Please follow the links below for more information -- some may be only accessible to HLP lab members or HLP lab guests.

• Non-subject-extracted relative clauses (NSRCs)

  • Corpus studies:
    • Jaeger (2006 -- my thesis)

    • Jaeger and Wasow (2006)

    • Wasow et al. (2009)

  • Experiments:

    • 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.

• Complement clauses (CCs)

  • Corpus studies:

    • Jaeger (submitted).

• Reduction of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs)

  • Corpus studies:

    • Reduction of passive SRCs in the BNC\ (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.

• to-omission after the verb help : There is some preliminary data, which I presented in some invited talks. Let me know if you want more information.