| Popis: |
When two arguments of a sentence vary in length, speakers of SOV languages prefer to place the longer constituent before the shorter one leading to a long-before-short word order (Hawkins, 2004; 2014). While the phenomenon of long-before-short has been widely observed in spoken and corpus experiments, there is little consensus on what motivates such an order. Two opposing accounts provide the functional motivation behind such an ordering choice. According to the first account, a long-before-short order make production efficient by keeping syntactic heads and dependents closer to each other (Gibson, 2000; Futrell. et al., 2020). The alternate account argues that a long-before-short order is a product of increased conceptual accessibility of long arguments during production (Yamashita and Chang, 2001). In most previous studies, accessibility and efficiency accounts either make similar predictions (a long-before-short order) or one of the factors was controlled ( (Ros et al., 2015; Faghiri and Samvelian, 2020). The role of these factors on preverbal word order is thus unclear, and a direct comparison between the two accounts is currently lacking. In this work, we use Hindi, an SOV language, to investigate this in a spoken sentence recall task. In order to do this, we use postnominal relative clause (RC) constructions. |
