The question of whether there exists a universal subject preference in relativization has stimulated research wide range languages and across different domains, yielding an extensive body literature relative clause acquisition processing. In this article, we aim at consolidating the efforts existing order to inform further exploration universality with comprehensive analysis relevant work (incl...

This article examines how certain types of semantic and discourse context affect the processing of relative clauses which are temporarily ambiguous between a relative clause and a main clause (e.g., "The actress selected by the director ..."). We review recent results investigating local semantic context and temporal context, and we present some new data investigating referential contexts. The ...

We present a large (65 million words of Wall Street Journal) and in-depth corpus study of a particular syntactic ambiguity to investigate (1) to what extent the structure of a grammar is reflected in a corpus, and (2)how probability flmctions defined according to a grammar fit independently established measures of syntactic disambiguation preference. We look at the well-known case of the ambigu...

In the generative literature, clause type effects have typically been modeled in one of two ways—“truncation” whereby embedded clauses are structurally reduced relative to root clauses, and intervention, by which non-root clauses have additional material that blocks movement available in root contexts. This paper analyzes two clause type effects in Basque— the possibility of verb-initial word o...