Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses

This paper aims to find a correlation between Information Density (ID) and extraposition of Relative Clauses (RC) in Early New High German. Since surprisal is connected to perceiving difficulties, the impact on the working memory is lower for frequent combinations with low surprisal-values than it i...

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Autores principales:	Sophia Voigtmann, Augustin Speyer
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:	information density Early New High German relative clauses extraposition corpus linguistics Psychology BF1-990
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/4947bbd178364457b32a07bbba91f214
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:4947bbd178364457b32a07bbba91f2142021-12-01T04:53:10ZInformation Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses1664-107810.3389/fpsyg.2021.650969https://doaj.org/article/4947bbd178364457b32a07bbba91f2142021-11-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.650969/fullhttps://doaj.org/toc/1664-1078This paper aims to find a correlation between Information Density (ID) and extraposition of Relative Clauses (RC) in Early New High German. Since surprisal is connected to perceiving difficulties, the impact on the working memory is lower for frequent combinations with low surprisal-values than it is for rare combinations with higher surprisal-values. To improve text comprehension, producers therefore distribute information as evenly as possible across a discourse. Extraposed RC are expected to have a higher surprisal-value than embedded RC. We intend to find evidence for this idea in RC taken from scientific texts from the 17th to 19th century. We built a corpus of tokenized, lemmatized and normalized papers about medicine from the 17th and 19th century, manually determined the RC-variants and calculated a skipgram-Language Model to compute the 2-Skip-bigram surprisal of every word of the relevant sentences. A logistic regression over the summed up surprisal values shows a significant result, which indicates a correlation between surprisal values and extraposition. So, for these periods it can be said that RC are more likely to be extraposed when they have a high total surprisal value. The influence of surprisal values also seems to be stable across time. The comparison of the analyzed language periods shows no significant change.Sophia VoigtmannSophia VoigtmannAugustin SpeyerAugustin SpeyerFrontiers Media S.A.articleinformation densityEarly New High Germanrelative clausesextrapositioncorpus linguisticsPsychologyBF1-990ENFrontiers in Psychology, Vol 12 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	information density Early New High German relative clauses extraposition corpus linguistics Psychology BF1-990
spellingShingle	information density Early New High German relative clauses extraposition corpus linguistics Psychology BF1-990 Sophia Voigtmann Sophia Voigtmann Augustin Speyer Augustin Speyer Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses
description	This paper aims to find a correlation between Information Density (ID) and extraposition of Relative Clauses (RC) in Early New High German. Since surprisal is connected to perceiving difficulties, the impact on the working memory is lower for frequent combinations with low surprisal-values than it is for rare combinations with higher surprisal-values. To improve text comprehension, producers therefore distribute information as evenly as possible across a discourse. Extraposed RC are expected to have a higher surprisal-value than embedded RC. We intend to find evidence for this idea in RC taken from scientific texts from the 17th to 19th century. We built a corpus of tokenized, lemmatized and normalized papers about medicine from the 17th and 19th century, manually determined the RC-variants and calculated a skipgram-Language Model to compute the 2-Skip-bigram surprisal of every word of the relevant sentences. A logistic regression over the summed up surprisal values shows a significant result, which indicates a correlation between surprisal values and extraposition. So, for these periods it can be said that RC are more likely to be extraposed when they have a high total surprisal value. The influence of surprisal values also seems to be stable across time. The comparison of the analyzed language periods shows no significant change.
format	article
author	Sophia Voigtmann Sophia Voigtmann Augustin Speyer Augustin Speyer
author_facet	Sophia Voigtmann Sophia Voigtmann Augustin Speyer Augustin Speyer
author_sort	Sophia Voigtmann
title	Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses
title_short	Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses
title_full	Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses
title_fullStr	Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses
title_full_unstemmed	Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses
title_sort	information density and the extraposition of german relative clauses
publisher	Frontiers Media S.A.
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/4947bbd178364457b32a07bbba91f214
work_keys_str_mv	AT sophiavoigtmann informationdensityandtheextrapositionofgermanrelativeclauses AT sophiavoigtmann informationdensityandtheextrapositionofgermanrelativeclauses AT augustinspeyer informationdensityandtheextrapositionofgermanrelativeclauses AT augustinspeyer informationdensityandtheextrapositionofgermanrelativeclauses
_version_	1718405658802388992

Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses

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