DERIVATIONALTHEORYOF COMPLEXITY

Early Chomskyan theory was based upon a set of transformational rules which derived surface structure sentences from their underlying deep structure forms. Thus the following sentences:

The old woman was warned by Joe.

The old woman wasn’t warned by Joe.

were both regarded as derived from Joe warned the old woman.

 Early psycholinguistic research adopted an assumption (the correspondence hypothesis) that Chomsky’s transformational grammar was psychologically real and represented the exact processes employed by a language user. The user was thought to assemble a sentence in deep structure, then take it through a series of transformations. Hence the derivational theory of complexity (DTC), which hypothesised that the more transformations there were, the more difficult it would be for a listener or reader to process a sentence.

Initial research demonstrated that subjects were faster to match a jumbled sentence to its negative form (one transformation) than to its negative passive form (two transformations). However, the experi ment suffered from flaws of design– not least, the greater length of the more complex sentences; and later trials turned up sentences where processing time and number of supposed transformations did not correlate. It also emerged that passive transformations only delayed the matching task in the case of reversible passives such as The boy was chased by the girl and not in the case of irreversible ones such as The flowers were watered by the girl. This suggested that semantic as well as syntactic factors were involved in the matching task. Finally, the DTC theory was based on the assumption that readers wait until the end of a sentence before decoding it, which we now know is not the case.

 See also: Syntactic parsing

Further reading: Aitchison (1998)

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مواضيع ذات صلة

DYSLEXIA: DEVELOPMENTAL

DYSLEXIA: ACQUIRED

DYSGRAPHIA: DEVELOPMENTAL

DYSGRAPHIA: ACQUIRED

DYSARTHRIA

DUPLEX PERCEPTION

DUAL ROUTE

DOWN SYNDROME

DISORDER

DICHOTIC LISTENING

DESIGN FEATURES

DEPTH OF PROCESSING