Job Discussion Forums

[adventious]

http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/08/mit-claims-to-have-found-a-language-universal-that-ties-all-languages-together/

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.

They found what they expected: “All languages have average dependency lengths shorter than the random baseline,” they write. This was especially true for longer sentences, which makes sense—there isn’t as much difference between “John threw out the trash,” and “John threw the trash out” as there is between the longer examples given above.

Screwy phrasal verbs...I've wrestled with how they split and what patterns to present to classes my whole career.

[fluffyhamster]

When I saw the first sentence I had nightmare visions of diagramming one of those ambiguous sentences (similar to Flying planes can be dangerous, or The shooting of the hunters...). At least the second sentence, strange as it may sound, would solve that particular problem. Anyway, it's good to see that UG isn't wrestling with anything too trivial still, though you'll surely find reasonably detailed, dependable and functional explanations of how splittable things are in any comprehensive-enough, relatively theory-neutral~mainstream grammar such as the CGEL or CamGEL.