Investigating the additive probability of repeated language production decisions

Abstract

Abstract This paper introduces an experimental paradigm based on probabilistic evidence of the interaction between construction decisions in a parsed corpus. The approach is demonstrated using ICE-GB, a one million-word corpus of English. It finds an interaction between attributive adjective phrases in noun phrases with a noun head, such that the probability of adding adjective phrases falls successively. The same pattern is much weaker in adverbs preceding a verb phrase, implying this decline is not a universal phenomenon. Noun phrase postmodifying clauses exhibit a similar initial fall in the probability of successive clauses modifying the same NP head, and embedding clauses modifying new NP heads. Successive postmodification shows a secondary phenomenon of an increase in additive probability in longer sequences, apparently due to ‘templating’ effects. The author argues that these results can only be explained as cognitive and communicative natural phenomena acting on and within recursive grammar rules.