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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 8, 2015 11:00:36 GMT 5.5
Cathleen O'Grady wrote an interesting article in ArsTechnica on 6 August 2015. Linguists and those interested in language may find this intriguing. ...A lot has been written about a tendency in languages to place words with a close syntactic relationship as closely together as possible. Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson at MIT were interested in whether all languages might use this as a technique to make sentences easier to understand.
The idea is that when sentences bundle related concepts in proximity, it puts less of a strain on working memory. For example, adjectives (like “old”) belong with the nouns that they modify (like “lady”), so it’s easier to understand the whole concept of “old lady” if the words appear close together in a sentence.
You can see this effect by deciding which of these two sentences is easier to understand: “John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen,” or “John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out.” To many English speakers, the second sentence will sound strange—we’re inclined to keep the words “threw” and “out” as close together as we can. This process of limiting distance between related words is called dependency length minimisation, or DLM... The above excerpt is not the crux of the article. Read the article here.
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