Sean Igo wrote
> I'm interested in an English garden-path phenomenon which
> arises when verbs in passive voice occur in reduced relative
> clauses, e.g.:
>
> "The horse _raced_ past the barn fell."
>
> as opposed to the non-reduced relative clause version,
>
> "The horse that _was raced_ past the barn fell."
I recall some psycholinguistic studies from many years ago
that indicate faster human response times when relative
pronouns are used in such constructions (and in some related
constructions in which they are optional). Unfortunately,
I do not have the references handy.
But anyone who has an English parser can easily demonstrate how
the option of omitting relative pronouns can slow down the parse:
1. Take any document in which one or more such sentences occur.
2. Replace every such occurrence with an equivalent sentence
that has explicit relative pronouns.
3. Remove the grammar rules that permit the relative pronouns
to be omitted.
4. Compare the parse time for the original version to the
parse time for the modified document with the modified
grammar.
For many broad-coverage parsers, the difference in time can be
enormous. In fact, most of the speed up results from faster
parsing of the sentences that do *not* contain any relative
pronouns -- i.e., the time spent in testing for such options
is longer than the time spent on the ones that actually occur.
If anyone has tried or would like to try the above experiment,
it would be interesting to see the statistics.
John Sowa
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