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2.2.2 Syntactic Complexity of Theme and Beneficiary
Syntactic complexity of theme and beneficiary is one of important predictors of word order and construction. The previous study on word order and
construction type claim that relative syntactic complexity is one of considerable factors Hawkins, 1994. In his study of relative clause, Hawkins suggests that as
the cumulative size and complexity of nominal modifiers increase, the distance between P and N increases in the pronominal order and the efficiency. It puts the
longer, relatively more complex expression at the end of the construction. One of technique of measuring syntactic complexity can be done by
counting the number of graphemic words Wasow2002, Szmrecsanyi2004. The results of Wasow‟s 2002 corpus study show a clear effect of constituent
weight on syntactic alignment in dative sentences. In the double object construction variants theme NP tends to be longer, whereas in prepositional dative
variants, recipient NP tends to be longer. His calculation shows that in both variants the final constituent is on average 3.5 times heavier than the constituent
occurring immediately post verbally. Bresnan
et al.
2007 use the metric to count the relative syntactic complexity, in which the complexity predictor is the signed logarithm of the
absolute value of the difference between the theme and recipient lengths in words. This kind of measure is intended to obtain the relative complexity of theme and
recipient in a continuous scale variable. This present research, the researcher uses a simpler measure as proposed
by Bresnan 2010. The relative complexity log scale is obtained by substracting the natural logarithm of the theme from the natural logarithm of beneficiary
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length. This measure will result in an ordinal value, in the form of a continuous variable. The examples below illustrate the feature syntactic complexity See also
Appendix 1 and 2.
7.
he said. Really, its the old cliche -- I play them one game at a time.
Elliott, the wide receiver, Its a lot of fun. verb
:
plays
theme :
one game 1 2 log scale
– counted based on the number of words, for
example the theme
one game
is 2 log scale as it consists of 2 words
beneficiary :
them 1 log scale
Length different = beneficiary length – theme length
= 1 – 2
= -1 log scale
2.2.3 Animacy of Theme and Beneficiary