Hindi-Urdu speakers routinely move words to the right of the verb—a grammatical option called rightward scrambling—and this project will measure how their brains handle the processing load when that movement involves words that are grammatically required versus optional. The research addresses a gap in linguistic theory: why do languages almost never shift a head word (like a noun) to the right, even though they freely shift it to the left? A new hypothesis suggests that moving obligatory material rightward is harder for the brain to parse than moving optional material. This project tests that idea in Hindi-Urdu, a language where rightward scrambling is common, using both theoretical analysis and real-time processing experiments. If successful, the project will provide the first psycholinguistic data on rightward movement from a non-English language, and validate a cheap, easy-to-run experimental method (the grammatical maze) for Hindi-Urdu. That methodological advance could allow regional institutions in South Asia to conduct large-scale psycholinguistic research without expensive eye-tracking equipment. The work is fundamental science—it deepens understanding of how human language works—but such insights into parsing difficulty have historically informed fields from speech therapy to natural language processing.
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One of the deepest drivers of research in theoretical linguistics is the search for linguistic universals, that is, the search for properties all languages share in common despite their superficial differences. Abels & Neeleman (under review) hypothesise that rightward movement of obligatory material is more difficult to parse than rightward movement of optional material and also more difficult to parse than leftward movement of optional or obligatory material. They suggest that this offers an explanation for the near total absence of rightward shifts of the head word, an obligatory element within its phrase, in the neutral word order patterns across languages. Leftward shifts of the head by contrast are readily attested. The most famous example of this asymmetry is Cinque's (2005) implementation of Greenberg's (1963:87) word order universal 20, which says: "When any or all of the items (demonstrative, numeral, and descriptive adjective) precede the noun, they are always found in that order. If they follow, the order is either the same or its exact opposite." In this context, the current project investigates properties of a particular word order alternation in Hindi-Urdu: rightward scrambling. Hindi-Urdu generally shows subject-object-verb-auxiliary word order, but both subjects and objects as well as a variety of adjuncts can also optionally follow verb and auxiliary under certain circumstances. The project has a theoretical and a psycholinguistic sub-project. On the theoretical side, we ask exactly which instances of rightward scrambling in Hindi-Urdu involve the kind of rightward shift that would make them fall under the scope of Abels & Neeleman's proposal. On the psycholinguistic side, we ask whether those instances of rightward scrambling give rise to the expected parsing difficulties when obligatory material is shifted rightward. More specifically, the theoretical sub-project investigates the properties of clauses with rightward scrambling in Hindi-Urdu and will develop an analysis overcoming the limitations of our current theoretical understanding of the phenomenon. Notably, current theoretical models are based almost exclusively on rightward scrambling of subjects and objects but fail to offer satisfactory approaches to rightward scrambled adjuncts and other material. The psycholinguistic sub-project aims to test whether the ideas about the real-time processing of rightward shifted word orders carry over to rightward scrambling in Hindi-Urdu. This research would break ground in that currently the only published data on the effect of obligatoriness in rightward movement comes from English. The project breaks ground also in the sense that it will present the first psycholinguistic studies on Hindi-Urdu using the grammatical maze methodology. We hope to show in a validation experiment that the maze method, which has a granularity comparable to eye tracking but is much easier and cheaper to run, works for Hindi-Urdu. Given the geographic and socioeconomic context in which Hindi-Urdu predominantly exists, the introduction of such a cost-effective method will enable regional institutions to investigate psycholinguistic phenomena on a much larger scale. We will then tackle the real-time processing of rightward scrambling in Hind-Urdu in the main experiment.
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