A Non-local Attachment Preference in the Production and Comprehension of Thai Relative Clauses

In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent one. Instances of adjacency violation pose a challenge to researchers but also an opportunity to better understand how people process sentences and to improve parsing algorithms by, for example, suggesting new features that can be used in machine learning. We report corpus counts and reading-time data for Thai to investigate an adjacency violation that has been reported in other languages for ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns, namely, the local noun (which is adjacent to the relative clause) or the non-local noun (which is farther from the relative clause). The results indicate that, unlike English, Thai violates adjacency by favoring non-local attachment even though the two languages share many grammatical features that have been linked to a local-attachment preference (e.g., rigid SVO word order). We re-interpret previous proposals to suggest that a language favors the non-local noun if it passes at least one of two tests. (1) Modifiers can intervene between noun and relative clause. (2) Adverbs can intervene between transitive verb and direct object.