Parsing and processing of sentences with pretransitive construction in Cantonese

Abstract of B.CogSci Thesis

KWAN Suk Mei

This paper discusses parsing and processing of sentences with pretransitive constrcution in Cantonese. Hawkins (1990) introduced several principles of constituency recogntion and parsing including mother node construction, Immediate Constituent Attachment, Constituent Recognition Domain (CRD) and Early Immediate Constituents (EIC). The aim of this thesis is to investigate the predictions of EIC, as a measure of processing efficiency, for a set of syntactic structures in Cantonese. The hypotheses for this study are: (1) 'pretransitive' constructions formed with 'zoeng' should be processed more rapidly than their S-V-O counterparts; (2) the preference for 'zoeng' versions should be proportional to the weight of the object of a senetnce. An experiment was carried out in the form of a reading task and reading time was recorded to examine the hypotheses. The results showed that the preference for 'zoeng' versions only appeared in sentence with 'heavy' object but not those with 'light' object. This can be accounted for in terms of the syntactic distinction and choice that are somehow determined by the intuition of native speakers.

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