The syntactic difficulty of Japanese sentences
This thesis investigates the various syntactic sources of difficulty or ease in processing Japanese sentences. The investigation utilises the theory of Word Grammar (Hudson 1984, 1990), within which dependency distance has been developed in order to measure syntactic difficulty. My main contention is that dependency distance is just one source of difficulty, so I argue against the common idea that syntactic difficulty equals syntactic complexity and that difficulty has a single syntactic explanation. After presenting the nature of syntactic difficulty and complexity and techniques of measuring syntactic difficulty in the first chapter, in the second chapter recent theories accounting for syntactic difficulty are reviewed. The third chapter outlines a model of a parser based on Word Grammar along with dependency distance. In the fourth chapter the status of 'words' in Japanese is discussed within the framework of Word Grammar, which seeks to express syntactic knowledge in terms of direct relationships between words, so as to resolve the special problem of function words that Japanese raises. The following two chapters provide preliminary experimental data. In the fifth chapter the first experiment tentatively
Hiranuma, So
Linguistics
The syntactic difficulty of Japanese sentences. This thesis investigates the various syntactic sources of difficulty or ease in processing Japanese sentences. The investigation utilises the theory of Word Grammar (Hudson 1984, 1990), within which dependency distance has been developed in order to measure syntactic difficulty. My main contention is that dependency distance is just one source of difficulty, so I argue against the common idea that syntactic difficulty equals syntactic complexity and that difficulty has a single syntactic explanation. After presenting the nature of syntactic difficulty and complexity and techniques of measuring syntactic difficulty in the first chapter, in the second chapter recent theories accounting for syntactic difficulty are reviewed. The third chapter outlines a model of a parser based on Word Grammar along with dependency distance. In the fourth chapter the status of 'words' in Japanese is discussed within the framework of Word Grammar, which seeks to express syntactic knowledge in terms of direct relationships between words, so as to resolve the special problem of function words that Japanese raises. The following two chapters provide preliminary experimental data. In the fifth chapter the first experiment tentatively
syntactic difficulty japanese sentence investigates various syntactic source difficulty ease process japanese sentence investigation utilise theory word_grammar hudson within dependency distance develop order measure syntactic difficulty main_contention dependency distance source difficulty argue common idea syntactic difficulty equal syntactic complexity difficulty single syntactic explanation present nature syntactic difficulty complexity technique measure syntactic difficulty first_second recent_theory account syntactic difficulty review third outline model parser base word_grammar along dependency distance fourth status words japanese discuss within_framework word_grammar seek express syntactic knowledge term direct relationship word resolve special problem function_word japanese raise follow_two provide_preliminary experimental_data fifth first tentatively