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The Influence of Prosody and Ambiguity on English Relativization Strategies

We present evidence that, for English, ambiguity is an active factor in the choice of relativization strategy and that, in speech, prosody plays a role in resolution of ambiguity over the internal role of the relativized constituent. The evidence is based on (semi-)automatic analysis and comparison of automatically-parsed written and spoken portions of the British National Corpus (BNC, Leech, 1992) and of the prosodically-transcribed Spoken English Corpus (SEC, Taylor and Knowles, 1988). The results are evaluated with respect to a model of parsing complexity and syntactic disambiguation (Briscoe 1987, 2000a) building on Combinatory Categorial Grammar (Steedman, 2000) and this model is in turn motivated by an evolutionary account of linguistic coevolutionary adaptation of the syntactic and phonological prosodic systems to a solution which minimizes processing cost. To our knowledge this is the first work which investigates linguistic adaptations aimed at reducing ambiguity while making testable predictions about linguistic organization. We work within the framework of evolutionary linguistics where we expect, other things being equal, that language traits and linguistic usage will be selected via successive generations of language acquisition for learnability, expressiveness, and/or interpretability (see Briscoe, 2000a,b)