The canonical word order myth: investigating a processing-typological puzzle in the Cantonese double object construction

Abstract

The frequency of canonicity (frequent, structurally basic and/or pragmatically neutral) word orders is often associated with easier processing, while syntactic alternatives usually incur complexity and processing difficulty (Hawkins, 2004; Ellis, 2002; Cook et al., 2009). In this paper we show that the canonical double-object construction (DOC, a) in Cantonese (VO with head-final NPs) is difficult to process in that incremental increases in the complexity of the direct object (DO) increase reading time (RT) and reduce recall accuracy relative to syntactic alternatives, and induce greater avoidance of the DOC in elicited production. We hypothesize that this is because the canonical word order involves processing-demanding center-embedding ...