A statistical model of syntactic and nonsyntactic factors affecting relative clause placement in Hindi
Adriana Molina‐Muñoz · 2021
Hindi is an SOV language that allows scrambling and has null arguments. Finite relative clauses can occupy three different positions: at the left edge of the main clause (left peripheral), at the right edge of the main clause (right peripheral), and immediately after the nominal head they modify (adnominal). The present study applies quantitative methods to a corpus of 2,000 sentences to investigate whether syntactic locality, grammatical weight, linear distance, and information structure affect the position of the relative clause at the left and right peripheries. A Multinomial Logistic Regression was selected as the prediction model. The predictability of the model was tested by means of a Confusion matrix or Error matrix.