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<Paper uid="P92-1039">
  <Title>RIGHT ASSOCIATION REVISITED *</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="285" end_page="285" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Heaviness
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Quirk et al. (1985) define end weight as the tendency to place material with more information content after material with less information content. This notion is closely related with end focus which is stated in terms of importance of the contribution of the constituent, (not merely the quantity of lexical material.) These two principles operate in an additive fashion. Quirk et al. use heaviness to account for a variety of phenomena, among them: * genitive NPs: the shock of his resignation, * his resignation's shock.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> * it-extraposition: It bothered me that she left quickly. ? That she left quickly bothered me.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Heaviness clearly plays a role in modifier attachment, as shown in table 1. My claim is that what is wrong with sentences such as (1) is the violation, in the high attachment, of the principle of end weight. While violations of the principle of end weight in unambiguous sentences (e.g. those in table 1) cause little grief, as they are easily accommodated by the hearer, the on-line decision process of disambiguationjcould well be much more sensitive to small differences in the degree of violation. In particular, it would seem that in (1)b, John sold it today.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> John sold the newspapers today.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> John sold his rusty socket-wrench set today.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> John sold his collection of 45RPM Elvis records today.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> John sold his collection of old newspapers from before the Civil War today.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> John sold today it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> John sold today the newspapers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> John sold today his rusty socket-wrench set.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> John sold today his collection of 45RPM Elvis records.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> John sold today his collection of old newspapers from before the Civil War.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> Table I: Illustration of heaviness and word order the heaviness-based preference for low attachment has a chance to influence the parser before the inference-based preference for high attachment.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> Theprecise definition of heaviness is an open problem. It is not clear whether end weight and end focus adequately capture all of its subtlety. For the present study I approximate heaviness by easily computable means, namely the presence of a clause within a given constituent. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="285" end_page="286" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 A study
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The consequence of my claim is that light adverbials cannot be placed after heavy VP arguments, while heavy adverbials are not subject to such a constraint. When the speaker wishes to convey the information in (1)a, there  are other word-orders available, namely, (3) a. Yesterday John said that Bill left.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> b. John said yesterday that Bill left.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  If the claim is correct then when a short adverbial modifies a VP which contains a heavy argument, the adverbial will appear either before the VP or between the verb and the argument. Heavy adverbials should be immune from this constraint.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> To verify this prediction, I conducted an investigation of the Penn Treebank corpus of about 1 million words syntactically annotated text from the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, the corpus does not distinguish between arguments and adjuncts - they're both annotated as daughters of VP. Since at this time, I do not have a dictionary-based method for distinguishing (VP asked (S when...)) from (VP left (S when...)), my search cannot include all adverbials, only those which could never (or rarely) serve as arguments. I therefore restricted my search to subgroups of the adverbials.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> 1. Ss whose complementizers participate overwhelmingly in adjuncts: after although as because before besides but by despite even lest meanwhile once provided should since so though unless until upon whereas while.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> 2. single word adverbials: now however then already here too recently instead often later once yet previously especially again earlier soon ever jirst indeed sharply largely usually together quickly closely directly alone sometimes yesterday The particular words were chosen solely on the basis of frequency in the corpus, without 'peeking' at their word-order behavior 1.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> For arguments, I only considered NPs and Ss with complementizer that, and the zero complementizer.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> The results of this investigation appear the following  Of 1431 occurrences of single word adverbials, 404 (28.2%) appear after the argument. If we consider only cases where the verb takes a heavy argument (defined as one which contains an S), of the 273 occurrences, only 5 (1.8%) appear after the argument. This interaction with heaviness of the argument is statistically significant</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Clausal adverbials tend to be placed after the verbal argument: only 20 out of the 662 occurrences of clausal adverbials appear at a position before the argument of the verb. Even when the argument is heavy, clausal adverbials appear on the right: 45 out of a total of 52 clausal adverbials (86.5%).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> (2) and (4) are two examples of RA-violating sentences which I have found.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> (4) Bankruptcy specialists say Mr. Kravis set a precedent for putting new money in sour LBOs recently when KKR restructured foundering Seaman Furniture, doubling KKR's equity slake.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> To summarize: light adverbials tend to appear before a heavy argument and heavy adverbials tend to appear after it. The prediction is thus confirmed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13">  RA is at a loss to explain this sensitivity to heaviness. But even a revision of RA, such as the one proposectby Schubert (1986) which is sensitive to the size of the modifier and of the modified constituent, would still require additional stipulation to explain the apparent conspiracy between a parsing strategy and tendencies in generator to produce sentences with the word-order properties observed above.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="286" end_page="286" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Parsing
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> How can we exploit the findings above in our design of practical parsers? Clearly RA seems to work extremely well for single word adverbials, but how about clausal adverbials? To investigate this, I conducted another search of the corpus, this time considering only ambiguous attachment sites. I found all structures matching the following two low-attached schemata 2 low VP attached: \[vp ... \[s * \[vp * adv *\] * \] ...\] low S attached: \[vp ... \[s * adv *\] ...\] and the following two high-attached schemata high VP attached: \[vp v * \[... \[s \]\] adv *\] high S attached: Is * \[... \[vp ... \[s \]\]\] adv * \] The results are summarized in the following table: adverb-type low-attached high-att. % high.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> single word 1116 10 0.8% clausal 817 194 19,2% As expected, with single-word adverbials, RA is almost always right, failing only 0.8% of the time. However, with clausal adverbials, RA is incorrect almost one out of five times.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="286" end_page="287" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Toward a Meaning-based ac-
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> count of Heaviness At the end of section 3 I stated that a declarative account of the ill-formedness of a heavy argument followed by a light modifier is more parsimonious than separate accounts for parsing preferences and generation preferences. I would like to suggest that it is possible to formalize the intuition of 'heaviness' in terms of an aspect of the meaning of the constituents involved, namely their givenness in the discourse.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Given entities tend to require short expressions (typically pronouns) for reactivation, whereas new entities tend to be introduced with more elaborated expressions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 2By * I mean match 0 or more daughters. By Ix ... \[y \]\] I mean constituent x contains constituent y as a rightmost descendant. By \[x ... \[y \] ... \] I mean constituent x contains constituent y as a descendant.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  In fact, it is possible to manipulate heaviness by changing the context. For example, (1)b is natural in the following dialog z (when appropriately intoned) A: John said that Bill will leave next week, and that Mary will go on sabbatical in September.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> B: Oh really? When announce all this? A: He said that Bill will leave yesterday, and he told us about Mary's sabbatical this morning.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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