基于依存树库的德汉英关系从句挂靠偏向比较研究

Attachment Preference of German,Chinese and English Relative Clauses:A Comparative Study Based on Dependency Treebanks

基于现有研究,以依存语法理论为依据,自建依存句法树库,以平均依存距离量化句法复杂程度,以德、汉、英三门语言为例,探讨不同语言关系从句的挂靠位置、挂靠模式与句法复杂度之间的关系,考察不同挂靠位置和挂靠模式对句子处理难度的影响。经研究发现:1)挂靠位置相同时,各语言关系从句的高挂靠比低挂靠更复杂,句子处理难度更大;2)挂靠模式相同时,不同语言关系从句的挂靠位置与句法复杂度之间的关系不一致;3)德英关系从句的复杂度虽然总体趋势一致,但德语句法复杂度明显大于英语。而汉语关系从句的复杂度以宾语位置高挂靠最大,主语位置低挂靠最小呈现出不同的趋势特点。工作记忆容量和不同语言的句法结构差异是产生以上结果的重要原因。

According to the existing research,dependency treebanks are built based on dependency grammar and mean dependency distance is used to measure the syntactic complexity.Taking German,Chinese and English as an example,this paper aims to explore the relationship among positions,types and syntactic complexity of relative clauses of different languages and to explore the difficulty caused by the differences of attachment in dealing with clauses.After comparative analysis,it is found that:1)Under the same position,the high attachment of German,Chinese and English relative clauses is more complicated and difficult to deal with than their low attachment;2)Under the same type,the attachment position and syntactic complexity of relative clauses of different languages are not exactly the same;3)Although the overall trend of the complexity of German and English relative clauses is the same,the syntactic complexity of German is obviously greater than that of English.Meanwhile,the high attachment of Chinese relative clause in object position has the most complexity and the low attachment in subject position has the least complexity.This is different from English and German.The above results are caused by memory capacity and syntactic differences of different languages.