Discourse Context Primes Hindi Word Order

Anonymous

Abstract: Hindi has a flexible word order, yet certain word orders are consistently preferred over others. A number of factors are known to influence Hindi word order preferences in isolation, including information structure and syntactic complexity. However, the relative impact of these factors on Hindi constituent ordering is not well understood. Inspired by prior work on syntactic priming, we investigate how the words and syntactic structures in a sentence influence the word order of the following sentences. Specifically, we extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB), we permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and we build a classifier to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against our generated distractors. The classifier uses a number of discourse-based features and cognitive features to make its predictions, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status. We find that lexical and syntactic priming and referent givenness drive order preferences. Moreover, along the lines of previous work in psycholinguistics, we find that certain verbs are more susceptible to priming than others. We conclude by situating our results within the broader syntactic priming literature.