Short dependencies

Claim: words that depend on each other stay close: a subject near its verb, a modifier next to what it modifies, a pronoun near what it refers to.

• Grade: measured in controlled sentences; supported with caveat in natural reading; a pronoun near what it refers to is applied by extension.
• Evidence: psycholinguistics (strand 2), against.
• Check: dependency-length (syntax, weekly): no word more than 12 words from the word it depends on; long-sentences on every push.
• Reader styles: none override it.

What it asks

• No long clause between a subject and its verb; move it after the verb or into its own sentence.
• Long lists and qualifications go after the main clause, not before it.

Why

Integration difficulty grows with the new discourse referents between a word and its head (Grodner & Gibson 2005). Dependency locality theory predicts this (Gibson 1998). Every one of 37 languages keeps its dependencies shorter than random reorderings would (Futrell et al. 2015).

Limits

In an eye-tracking corpus the cost held for nouns and not for words in general (Demberg & Keller 2008). Interference between similar words, not distance itself, may carry the cost (Lewis & Vasishth 2005). The studies measure syntactic dependencies; a pronoun and what it refers to are not one, so that clause is applied by extension. The centering studies here (Gordon 1993) test which word a pronoun refers to, not its distance.