| Abstract |
| This study asks whether the speaker
makes decisions about syntax in the construction of complex sentences (those containing at
least one subordinate clause). The speaker's disruptions, for example, filled
pauses and tongue slips, are taken as clues to his decision making. Results show
that in monologues, speech disruptions are not correlated with sentence complexity (number
of subordinate clauses) when sentence length is constant. However, in both
monologues and dialogues, a particular syntactic distinction has relevance for
performance, that is, noun phrase complement constructions are more likely to be disrupted
than sentences containing relative clauses. It is concluded that syntactical and
situational context are factors in the speaker's production decisions. |
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