Information Density as a Factor for Variation in the Embedding of Relative Clauses

In German, relative clauses can be positioned in-situ or extraposed. A potential factor for the variation might be information density. In this study, this hypothesis is tested with a corpus of 17 th century German funeral sermons. For each referent in the relative clauses and their matrix clauses, the attention state was determined (first calculation). In a second calculation, for each word the surprisal values were determined, using a bi-gram language model. In a third calculation, the surprisal values were accommodated as to whether it is the first occurrence of the word in question or not. All three calculations pointed in the same direction: With in-situ relative clauses, the rate of new referents was lower and the average surprisal values were lower, especially the accommodated surprisal values, than with extraposed relative clauses. This indicated that information density is a factor governing the choice between in-situ and extraposed relative clauses. The study also sheds light on the intrinsic relationship between the information theoretic concept of information density and information structural concepts such as givenness which are used under a more linguistic perspective.