title: Information Density and Syntactic Repetition.
abstract: In noun phrase (NP) coordinate constructions (e.g., NP and NP), there is a strong tendency for the syntactic structure of the second conjunct to match that of the first; the second conjunct in such constructions is therefore low in syntactic information. The theory of uniform information density predicts that low-information syntactic constructions will be counterbalanced by high information in other aspects of that part of the sentence, and high-information constructions will be counterbalanced by other low-information components. Three predictions follow: (a) lexical probabilities (measured by N-gram probabilities and head-dependent probabilities) will be lower in second conjuncts than first conjuncts; (b) lexical probabilities will be lower in matching second conjuncts (those whose syntactic expansions match the first conjunct) than nonmatching ones; and (c) syntactic repetition should be especially common for low-frequency NP expansions. Corpus analysis provides support for all three of these predictions.
authors.affiliation: Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Temperley
authors.affiliation: Computer Science Department, University of Rochester.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Gildea
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011336:Probability; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Coordination; Information; Language production; Probabilistic models; Syntax