Sentence Parsing in a Morphologically Rich Language – Finnish

Abstract

We review evidence on how sentences are parsed in Finnish – a morphologically rich language. The reviewed studies focus on effects of word order, morphological agreement, and morphological complexity. As regards word order, it has been shown that infrequent word orders are more difficult to process than frequent word orders. Moreover, pragmatic constraints can wipe out the effect of structural frequency, although the pragmatic influence is non-immediate. Morphological agreement in modifier–head noun phrases facilitates their processing. The effect is delayed in nature, which (in combination with other evidence) suggests that facilitation operates at the level of syntactic integration. Finally, evidence is reviewed that demonstrates an effect of morphological complexity and density in the processing of complex verb constructions, but only when the complex and less complex constructions are equally frequent. This is not the case when the complex construction is more frequent, suggesting the structural frequency can override a morphological complexity effect.