Object Relatives Can Ease Processing Load: Evidence from Serbian

Abstract

Are subject relatives easier then object relatives? Many studies have argued that relative clauses in which the subject position is relativized are easier to precss then relative clauses in which the object position is relativized (King and Just 1991, Fraizer 1987, Schriefers et al. 1995 and others). For example, Schrirfers et al. found longer reading times at t the final auxiliary verb in (2) than in (1), (1) Das ist die Managerini diei ti die Artbeiterinnen gesehen hat. This is the manager who the workers seen has ‘This is the manager who has seen the workers’ (2) Das sind die Artbeiterinneni diei die Managerin ti gesehen hat These are the workers who the manager seen has ‘There are workers who the manager has seen’ Only in the final auxiliary is the relative disambiguated to an object reading of the head noun, by virtue of singular agreement between die Managerin and hat. In German and similar languages, the head precedes the relative, and thus the (linear and structural distance) between the head noun and the subject position is shorter than the distance between the head and the object position. Thus, if the processing mechanism operates under a principle of maximal effort to resolve a dependency as soon as possible, the preference will be to interpret the head as subject in (2), only to discover its mistake when the relative is disambiguated to an object interpretation.