Information Theory and Linearization Patterns of English Phrasal Prepositional Verbs

up with). • Problem: adverb placement within these structures. a. I (sometimes run out of) ideas. b.?I (run sometimes out of) ideas. c.?I (run out sometimes of) ideas. d. *I (run out of sometimes) ideas. • Phrasal prepositional verbs display a clear preference for adverb placement at the very beginning of the verb phrase. It is interesting to note that this is NOT a general trend of English verbal structure. a. I sometimes eat. b. I eat sometimes. c. I happily went to the store. d. I went happily to the store. etc. • What, then, is the reason for the idiosyncratic behavior of phrasal prepositional verbs? • Goal: use Information Theory to model our biases against certain permutations (b, c, d) and our preferences for others (a). • The present examination of phrasal prepositional verbs is a case study in the more general domain of syntactic linearization, the grammatical mechanism that governs word order in sentences. Theory • Information content =-log2P(X=xi|C), where C is some linguistic context (Shannon 1948). • Levy & Jaeger 2007 argues that Uniform Information Density (UID) is a general principle of rapid, error-free communication. In essence, their theory claims that language users find large “spikes ” in information content undesirable. • This makes sense if we make the reasonable assumption that communication operates within a noisy channel. If a single linguistic item carrying a massive amount of information is somehow lost, then the message becomes very difficult to comprehend. If all items are weighted relatively equally, however, then it is possible to piece the message back together even if there are errors in transmission or reception. • Prediction: speakers obey the UID principle and choose the adverbial configuration that results in the most evenly distributed information content