A Cognitive account of unbounded dependency

counts Ii)t' some island effcet (t;hc noun-coml~lemcnt ca',ms oi" Complex NP Consh':dnt) which is c.rre~:Lly unexplained by slatic approaches i:~ I, raditioua.] theories o1 syntax. This ex-']'he purpose of the present article, is to aceounI; for sy:itac tic constrai,:ts on some aspects of unborn:deal dependency (UBD he~'eafter) phenomeua, by means el a computational model. A COml)ul, a.donal model is described in terms o!' for-real operations on founal structures. At: eXlAanatien based on such a. model is to ascribe the pheuomcnon in question to some compul;ational properties of the model; i.e., sud: properties as computational cornplexity with regard to both space and time, accessib:li~;y to some parts of memory, and so forth. A major advantage of this sort; of computational approach is that it can mention dymmlic aspects of phenomena, such as i;emporal order of processing and structural ambiguity a~ising dynamically in tit<', course of comprehending or producing utterances. aspects and has limited itself t;() investigation of characteristics of langttage whid~ could bc tMked about in static terms. "lb say that S-structure is derived h'om D-structm:e, for example, does not imply that the former chronologically precedes the latter. In fact, many lingnistic (especially syntactic) phenomena can be understood without referring to ambiguity, processing order, etc. This is partly why linguistics has seen its successes. Nevertheless, languages haw~ some 1)roper tit's essentially stem-mint out of dyn&mic features of la.ngtmge processing (or lu~vb<: of a, more gencra.{ cognitive procese;er, after Piaget). Our re&in concern hole is with such dynamic aspects o[ language. In what follmw, we shall first touch Ul)OU some cognltive viewpoint appUcd to several types of islaud phenomena, showing that some significant part of liuguistic accotlnt is reducible to processing terms. Furl;her shall we go on to demonstrate that a dynamic approach can elucidate some phenomenon, the noun-complement case of the complex ~lou. phrase constraint, which is unlikely to be explicable in sta.tic terms of tradit;kmal synta.c-[;ic theories. (3) ':What/ do you wonder wit<) :~t;e ei? (4) *Whoi do you wonder whalj / gave Li to ci? (5) *Whoi did a story about ~i surprise you? The grammatical si.~Lttls of these strings is ut:derstood without referring to dynamic terms such as tempocal processing order, structural ambiguity, etc. Let us see how. The syntactic operations of l!;ng]ish wc will pay attet:tio)l lo in the following (Uscusskm are what we migtlt call complenmn-ration, specification, adjunetion, binding, and passing, each of which Lakes place …