An eye tracking study investigated the effects of local and global discourse context on the processing of subject and object relative clauses, whereby the contexts favored either a subject relative clause interpretation or an object relative clause interpretation. The fixation data replicated previous studies showing that object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than subj...

This contribution reports on three sentence processing experiments involving structurally ambiguous Jabberwocky strings. The items are complex NPs, in which a relative clause can be attached to either of two nominal heads (NP1-preposition-NP2-RC). The phonological lengths of the heads, as well as that of the relative clause, are manipulated. The results show modest effects on relative clause at...

Relative clause attachment may be triggered by binding requirements imposed by a short anaphor contained within the relative clause itself: in case more than one possible attachment site is available in the previous structure, and the relative clause itself is extraposed, a conflict may arise as to the appropriate s/c-structure which is licenced by grammatical constraints but fails when the bin...

The aim of this paper is to describe a technique for identifying the sources of several types of syntactic ambiguity in Arabic Sentences with a single parse only. Normally, any sentence with two or more structural representations is said to be syntactically ambiguous. However, Arabic sentences with only one structural representation may be ambiguous. Our technique for identifying Syntactic Ambi...

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2;0 to 5;0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with main-c...

In relative clause extraposition (RCE) in English, a subject-modifying relative clause is displaced to a position following the verb phrase, as in Some research was conducted that supports the existing theory. Previous studies have revealed that both grammatical weight (i.e. relative constituent length) and discourse factors are important for determining when and why speakers use RCE. However, ...

In this paper we investigate the Presentational Relative Clause (PRC) construction. In both the linguistic and NLP literature, relative clauses have been considered to contain background information that is not directly relevant or highly useful in semantic analysis. In text summarization in particular, the information contained in the relative clauses is often removed, being viewed as non-cent...