Information Density as a Factor for Variation in the Embedding of Relative Clauses

TL;DR

This study investigates how information density influences the placement of relative clauses in 17th century German, showing that lower information density favors in-situ placement, linking information theory with linguistic structure.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that information density affects relative clause positioning in historical German, integrating information theory with syntactic variation.

Findings

Lower referent rate in in-situ clauses

Lower surprisal values in in-situ clauses

Information density influences clause placement

Abstract

In German, relative clauses can be positioned in-situ or extraposed. A potential factor for the variation might be information density. In this study, this hypothesis is tested with a corpus of 17th century German funeral sermons. For each referent in the relative clauses and their matrix clauses, the attention state was determined (first calculation). In a second calculation, for each word the surprisal values were determined, using a bi-gram language model. In a third calculation, the surprisal values were accommodated as to whether it is the first occurrence of the word in question or not. All three calculations pointed in the same direction: With in-situ relative clauses, the rate of new referents was lower and the average surprisal values were lower, especially the accommodated surprisal values, than with extraposed relative clauses. This indicated that in-formation density is a factor governing the choice between in-situ and extraposed relative clauses. The study also sheds light on the intrinsic relation-ship between the information theoretic concept of information density and in-formation structural concepts such as givenness which are used under a more linguistic perspective.