In this paper we will be dealing with different levels of complexity in the processing of Italian, a Romance language inheriting many properties from Latin which make it an almost free word order language1. The paper is concerned with syntactic complexity as measurable on the basis of the cognitive parser that incrementally builds up a syntactic representation to be used by the semantic component. The theory behind will be LFG and parsing preferences will be used to justify one choice both from a principled and a processing point of view. LFG is a transformationless theory in which there is no deep structure separate from surface syntactic structure. This is partially in accordance with constructional theories in which noncanonical structures containing non-argument functions FOCUS/TOPIC are treated as multifunctional constituents. Complexity is computed on a processing basis following suggestions made by Blache and demonstrated by Kluender and Chesi.

Syntactic and Lexical Complexity in Italian Noncanonical Structures

DELMONTE, Rodolfo
2016-01-01

Abstract

In this paper we will be dealing with different levels of complexity in the processing of Italian, a Romance language inheriting many properties from Latin which make it an almost free word order language1. The paper is concerned with syntactic complexity as measurable on the basis of the cognitive parser that incrementally builds up a syntactic representation to be used by the semantic component. The theory behind will be LFG and parsing preferences will be used to justify one choice both from a principled and a processing point of view. LFG is a transformationless theory in which there is no deep structure separate from surface syntactic structure. This is partially in accordance with constructional theories in which noncanonical structures containing non-argument functions FOCUS/TOPIC are treated as multifunctional constituents. Complexity is computed on a processing basis following suggestions made by Blache and demonstrated by Kluender and Chesi.
2016
CL4LC - Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/3683310
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