That's Optional: A Contemporary Exploration of "that" Omission in English Subordinate Clauses

Ella Rabinovich
5/31/2024
cs.CL

No official code found. Best implementation: ellarabi/uid-that-sc-omission (0 stars, last commit 2024-05-26).

Abstract

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers optimize the communicative properties of their utterances by avoiding spikes in information, thereby maintaining a relatively uniform information profile over time. This paper investigates the impact of UID principles on syntactic reduction, specifically focusing on the optional omission of the connector "that" in English subordinate clauses. Building upon previous research, we extend our investigation to a larger corpus of written English, utilize contemporary large language models (LLMs) and extend the information-uniformity principles by the notion of entropy, to estimate the UID manifestations in the usecase of syntactic reduction choices.

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ellarabi/uid-that-sc-omissionCommunity100%
00May 26, 20242 years ago

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Cite this paper

@article{rabinovich2024thats,
  title  = {That's Optional: A Contemporary Exploration of "that" Omission in English Subordinate Clauses},
  author = {Ella Rabinovich},
  year   = {2024},
  eprint = {2405.20833},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20833v1}
}

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