A Syntactic Study Of Chinese And English Garden Path Sentences Based On Information Dependency Language Model

Garden path sentence is a kind of sentence with temporary ambiguity. If it isinterpreted in the normal way, it will be found that to the end of the sentence the formerinterpretation is not correct. Therefore, the processor has to backtrack and reinterpret thesentence in another way. It was Bever (1970) who first proposed the garden pathsentence “The horse raced past the barn fell”. When the processing goes to the word“barn”, most people would regard “raced” as predicate. However, when the processingcontinues to “fell”, it will be figured out that the previous interpretation is wrong, and itis “fell” that should constitute the predicate of the sentence. This is pretty like whenwalking down the main path of a garden enjoying the beautiful scenery, the majority ofpeople insist that the exit of the garden must be at the end of the main path, whileunexpectedly, the only path that leads to the gate is a desolate one branching out at someplace they have passed. Researches on garden path sentences have been conducted fromthe perspective of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and grammatical analysis.Studies on garden path sentences at abroad start early. Frazier&Rayner (1982)analyzed them in terms of psycholinguistics and proposed the principle of Late Closureand Minimal Attachment as well as other independent parsing strategies about syntacticprocessing. Prichett (1988,1992) dealt with garden path sentences from the perspectiveof grammatical analysis and held that the occurrence of garden path effects derivedfrom the violation of the principle of theta-attachment which was part of Governmentand Binding Theory. Gibson (1991) put forth a parallel processing model on the basis ofthematic roles and phrase structure.However, researches into garden path sentences at home start late. Feng Zhiweiand Xu Fuji (2003) discovered that there are four kinds of potential ambiguousstructures ready to be instantiated to become garden path sentences. They areNP1+VP+NP2+de+NP3, VP+NP1+de+NP2, V+Adj+de+N and V1+V2+de+N. Inaddition, they investigated the strength of garden path effects by putting forward theterm of “garden path degree” which refers to the ratio of MV/RR. Liu Guohui and ShiXishu (2005) explored the root of garden path effects and the decoding process ofgarden path effects with respect to linguistic knowledge schema and world knowledgeschema. Chen Manhua (2009) gave a portray of different types of garden path sentences,and explained the generating mechanism of garden path sentences in terms of frame, script and preference rules.Previous researches have conducted relatively deep analysis of garden pathsentences from various aspects, but researches into garden path sentences in English andChinese conducted from the perspective of one single theory have not been discoveredyet. This paper attempts to collect typical instances of garden path sentences in Chineseand English as many as possible and make an overall categorization of them, on thebasis of which, this study will additionally conduct a corpus-oriented formalizedsyntactic description of garden path sentences from the perspective of cognitive andsyntactic analysis, with Information Dependency Language Model (IDLM) as thetheoretical foundation.Information Dependency Language Model (IDLM) is a corpusconstruction-oriented syntactic tagging theory created by Li Liangyan (2009). On theground of Phrase Structure Grammar and Dependency Grammar, it adopts conceptualautonomy and dependency principle in Cognitive Grammar, and puts emphasis onlanguage description and language analysis, featured by the integrated consideration ofsyntax and semantics simultaneously.The thesis includes five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction concerningresearch background, research objective, research significance, research contentstogether with research methodology. Chapter Two is literature review, which involvesevolving versions of the defining of garden path sentences, the distinction betweengarden path sentences and global ambiguous sentences as well as related researches ongarden path sentences at home and abroad. Chapter three is theoretical foundation,expounding on Information Dependency Model and Information Dependency LanguageModel along with the operation instructions of the software of IDLM Editor. Chapterfour was the main body, which makes a clarification of garden path instances in bothlanguages, carries out IDLM analysis of them and the controlled sentences according toIDLM theory and presents the vivid Information Dependency Graph (IDG) with theassistance of IDLM Editor.It has been found out that the classification of Chinese and English garden pathsentences in the macro level is similar. Since the root of garden path effect is languageambiguity, garden path sentences can be classified in accordance with the source ofambiguity into two categories: garden path sentences due to lexical ambiguity andgarden path sentences due to structural ambiguity. Chinese garden path sentences due tolexical ambiguity involve three types which are verb particle/verb of complement clause, verb particle/adjective in NP specifier and locative particle/verb of mainclause. As to English garden path sentences due to lexical ambiguity, there areverb/noun ambiguity and noun/adjective ambiguity. Chinese garden path sentences dueto structural ambiguity contain three types being subject of main clause/object of PPadjunct, verb of relative clause/verb of complement clause, subject of mainclause/object of verb in preceding subordinate clause while for English there are verb ofrelative clause/verb of main clause, subject of main clause/object of subordinateclause and subject of relative clause/direct object of ditransitive verb.The body of the thesis deals with the IDLM expression and IDG of garden pathsentences not only in different categories longitudinally but also between one gardenpath sentence and its controlled sentence syntagmatically. It has been discovered that ata macro level, the generation of some Chinese and English garden path sentences hassomething in common. Some of them are achieved through morpheme displacementand morpheme omission. However, garden path sentences of the same category in thetwo languages are generated differently from each other.The current research is of theoretical value for corpus construction and of practicalvalue for language teaching. On the one hand, it furnishes the formalized syntacticdescription recognizable for computers, and thus is very valuable for corpus syntactictagging. On the other hand, the IDLM expressions and IDGs are quite helpful forlanguage learners to acquire an exact and deep understanding of the special sentencepattern—garden path sentences. Last but not least, the study fully verifies the effectivityand feasibility of IDLM, which succeeds in the formalized description not only inChinese garden path sentences but also in English garden path sentences.