Talk:Right-branching sentences in English

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Untitled[edit]

1) I deleted the link "Roy Peter Clark. 'Writing tools'" - the link was dead.

2) The remaining two citations do not support the passage: "Right-branching sentences are generally held to be easier to read than other similarly-complex grammatical structures in English, perhaps because other branching styles require the listener to hold more information in memory to be able to correctly interpret the sentence. Indeed, some researchers have even hypothesized that the structure is optimal for all natural languages, commenting that it is common in many languages and not only English."

a) The article "Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Language" does not cross-compare a right-branching language with a left-branching language. It compares English with English, and English does have both left-branching structures as well as right-branching structures. But it does not follow that Japanese speakers will have a hard time processing left-branching structures because English speakers have a harder time processing them. Japanese, btw, has left-branching syntax trees.

b) http://www.cog.brown.edu/.../pdf_files/Kimball(Parsung).pdf): All the sample sentences of these syntax trees are in English. In that article, there are no syntax trees of other languages, in particular, that of left-branching languages, to make comparisons. The claim that languages with right-branching structures are easier to process cannot be supported when there isn't even a left-branching language in the article to make that comparison.

c) Examine the following snippet: "Indeed, some researchers have even hypothesized..." - exactly who are these researchers? If this paragraph is to be credible, it has to be supported by names with references linked to them. "Some" doesn't contribute to the objectivity of this paragraph, it detracts from it because of it unspecificity.

It is for these reasons that I recommend striking out the passage I marked as disputed. If the passage is to be retained, more convincing evidence will need to be added, both in the text and with supporting references. Nickcamporillo (talk) 22:56, 15 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Right-to-left languages[edit]

How is this terminology dealt with in languages which are written in the other direction to English. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bearsca (talk • contribs) 16:12, 2 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]