The professor chewed the students…out: Effects of dependency, length, and adjacency on word order preferences in sentences with verb particle constructions

Recent theories have proposed that processing difficulty affects both individuals’ choice of grammatical structures and the distribution of these structures across languages of the world (e.g., Hawkins, 1994, 2004). Thus, more complex relative clauses are more difficult to process and less prevalent across languages (Keenan & Hawkins, 1987), longer NPs are shifted to produce maximally efficient word orders (Gibson, 1998; Stallings et al., 1998), and semantically dependent sentence constituents are placed adjacent to each other (Lohse et al., 2004). In a corpus study, Gries (2003) has shown that these factors, among others, affect the placement of the particle in the English verb particle construction.

Verb particle constructions include a verb (e.g., look) and a particle (e.g., up) that can be produced adjacently as in ‘he looked up the word’ or separately (with an intervening object noun phrase) as in ‘he looked the word up.’ These constructions also vary in the degree to which the verb depends on the particle for its meaning. For example, chew out depends on out for its meaning, while finish updoes not get much of its meaning from up. I will report on a series of experiments testing the interaction of both lexical and syntactic factors on reading times for sentences with verb particle constructions. The pattern of results indicates that lexical factors, such as semantic dependency, and syntactic constraints, such as adjacency, NP length and complexity, affect reading times in comprehension tasks. The findings are consistent with corpora and production studies of word order preference and support Hawkins’ (1994, 2004) notion that word order is influenced by performance factors. In additions, the results suggest that those structures that are more common across languages of the world are more easily processed by individuals.