Comparing extraposition and topicalisation : an experimental study of sentence processing in German and Cantonese

Abstract

Modern German and Cantonese are typologically interesting languages that show disharmonic combination of word orderings, such that their canonical orderings of the noun and its modifying relative clause are rarely found in the other languages of the same phrasal order. The mirroring image in terms of the orderings of noun and relative clause as presented by the two languages (German: OV + NRel; Cantonese: VO + RelN) seem to show a symmetry because both orderings are equally productive and attested (Hawkins, 2002). Such symmetry is further enhanced by the syntactic phenomenon of word-order rearrangements found in the respective language: Relative clause extraposition in German displaces the sentence-final verb, thereby postponing the relative clause, whereas topicalisation of the sentential object in Cantonese preposes the relative clause, creating another mirroring image of word-order displacement. One motivating factor for such rearrangement, as hypothesised by Hawkins’ (1994, 2004) domain minimisation principles, is that the rearranged syntactic structures render higher efficiency in parsing in correlation with clausal complexity: relative clause extraposition in German and topicalisation of Object noun phrase (NP) in Cantonese are similarly predicted to motivated by high complexity of the relative clauses. Following Francis (2010), the effect of clausal complexity was tested employing acceptability judgment tasks by recruiting native speakers of the two respective languages to test Hawkins’ theory. The mean acceptability ratings of the experiment, however, did not find a significant advantage of the rearranged sentences over their canonical variants in both languages. Further studies employing online experiments are encouraged to further investigate the findings.