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In:Language Change at the Interfaces: Intrasentential and intersentential phenomena
Edited by Nicholas Catasso, Marco Coniglio and Chiara De Bastiani
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 275] 2022
► pp. 235–252

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Informational aspects of the extraposition of relative clauses

 | Saarland University
Published online: 21 April 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.275.08voi
Abstract
This paper investigates the correlation of information structure (givenness) and the extraposition of relative clauses from Early New High German (16th century) to early Modern German (19th century) via a corpus study of letters. It aims to determine whether relative clauses with a high proportion of new referents are more likely to be extraposed because new referents put more strain on the working memory and can therefore be better interpreted at a position where more memory capacities are available again (Gibson 1989) and help spread the information of the whole sentence more evenly (Levy & Jaeger 2007). Another goal of the paper is to show that there is a decreasing influence of information structure on extraposition over the centuries. It will be shown that there is evidence for both hypotheses put forward in the paper.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research hypotheses
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Selection of texts
    • 3.2Procedure and operationalization
  • 4.Data
    • 4.1Given and new referents in relative clauses
    • 4.2Given and new referents in the matrix clauses
  • 5.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
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