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Paper

Left-corner Minimalist parsing of mixed word order preferences

Author
  • Lei Liu

Abstract

This paper proposes a uniform, structure-based account for mixed word order preferences crosslinguistically. These preferences include the short-before-long preference in the English heavy NP shift, the long-before-short preference in the Japanese transitive sentences, and the absence of word order preference in Mandarin Chinese preverbal PPs. The syntactic structures of each competing word orders are formally characterized using Minimalist grammars (MGs) and constructed with a left-corner MG parser. Complexity metrics are derived from the parser's behavior, which relate the difficulties of the structure building process to memory load. The metrics show that the preferred word orders are less memory-intensive to build than their counterparts in both the short-before-long and the long-before-short cases, while no memory resource differences are found for the case where no word order preference exists. The results suggest that the preferred word orders – or a lack thereof – follow from their syntactic structures. This further supports the viability of left-corner MG parsing as a psycholinguistically adequate model for human sentence processing. 

Keywords: minimalist grammar, sentence processing, word order

How to Cite:

Liu, L., (2025) “Left-corner Minimalist parsing of mixed word order preferences”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 8(1): 26. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.3188

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Published on
2025-06-13

Peer Reviewed