Optimality in Sentence Processing
نویسندگان
چکیده
In this chapter we explore the possibility that within Optimality Theory, a single syntactic grammar directly yields not only competence theoretic results on the grammatical distributions of elements, but also performance theoretic results on relative preferences when processing sentences with various syntactic ambiguities. Whereas the competence theory applies the grammar at the level of an entire sentence, the performance theory incrementally optimizes interpretation one word at a time. Rankings of syntactically motivated constraints yield correct predictions for a number of ambiguities in English sentence processing, and accounts for a range of cross-linguistic variation in parsing preferences for a widely studied ambiguity.
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