I review evidence for the claim that syntactic ambiguities are resolved on the basis of the meaning of the competing analyses, not their structure. I identify a collection of ambiguities that do not yet have a meaning-based account and propose one which is based on the interaction of discourse and grammatical function. I provide evidence for my proposal by examining statistical properties of th...

The present study of ambiguity at the syntactic level in the English language focuses on its resourceful applications in the creation of jokes. Such ambiguity is therefore regarded as something to be exploited in language rather than avoided. One important conclusión will be that British humour should not be regarded as "strange" by speakers of other languages, who can only access to it by mean...

In this paper, we present a new type of annotated corpus, called BushBank, which improves handling of ambiguity in natural language. Unlike in traditional approaches where data are directly disambiguated, in a BushBank, disambiguation is done later, based on application needs. This has major impact on the structures used in the corpus, since ordinary syntactic trees disallow ambiguity. Our appr...

Incremental parsing is the task of assigning a syntactic structure to an input sentence as it unfolds word by word. Incremental parsing is more difficult than fullsentence parsing, as incomplete input increases ambiguity. Intuitively, an incremental parser that has access to semantic information should be able to reduce ambiguity by ruling out semantically implausible analyses, even for incompl...

A theory of the way working memory capacity constrains comprehension is proposed. The theory proposes that both processing and storage are mediated by activation and that the total amount of activation available in working memory varies among individuals. Individual differences in working memory capacity for language can account for qualitative and quantitative differences among college-age adu...

In this chapter, we focus on a previously ignored aspect of sentence processing theories: is processing difficulty caused by reanalysis or competition? According to two-stage theories (e.g., Frazier, 1979; Rayner, Frazier, & Carlson, 1983), reanalysis should occur when an initially adopted reading is inappropriate. In contrast, current constraint-based theories (e.g., MacDonald, 1994; McRae, Sp...

We have developed a Bayesian classi er to determine whether syllables in connected Thai speech are weakly or strongly stressed by using ve acoustic parameters: syllable rhyme duration, mean F0, F0 standard deviation, mean energy, and the standard deviation of the energy. With speaker-dependent data normalization, we achieved a classi cation accuracy of 99%. The classi cation accuracy drops to 9...

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets...

This paper investigates whether surprisal theory can account for differential processing difficulty in the NP-/S-coordination ambiguity in Dutch. Surprisal is estimated using a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG), which is induced from an automatically annotated corpus. We find that our lexicalized surprisal model can account for the reading time data from a classic experiment on this amb...

This paper discusses logics whose premisses and/or conclusions can contain ambiguous material. Two diierent kinds of applications are sketched for these logics. First, the paper discusses how logics with ambiguous expressions can shed light on the way in which human hearers or readers understand certain`paradoxical' logical arguments, in which crucial use is made of ambiguous material. Second, ...