3. The modification problem In the first part of this State-of-the-Article I discussed the connectivity problem, namely, the syntactic relation between the relative ‘‘head’’ and the relativization site. The second general issue that I will be discussing here is the way in which the whole relative clause is syntactically related to the modified ‘‘head’’. As a preliminary, it is necessary to dete...

Three experiments (self-paced reading, eyetracking and an ERP study) show that in relative clauses, increasing the distance between the relativized noun and the relative-clause verb makes it more difficult to process the relative-clause verb (the so-called locality effect). This result is consistent with the predictions of several theories (Gibson, 2000; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), and contradic...

This squib presents two puzzles related to an ambiguity found in For-infinitival relative clauses (FIRs). FIR’s always receive a modal interpretation even in the absence of any overt modal verb, and the modal interpretation seems to come in two distinct types, which can be paraphrased by finite relative clauses employing, respectively, the modal auxiliaries should and could. The two puzzles pre...

This paper presents a novel analysis of so-called gapless relative clause constructions such as Mandarin xiangpi ranshao de weidao (literally, ‘the smell that rubber burns’). Such constructions have been observed in East Asian languages. It is claimed that the Head noun of such relative clauses are relational nouns, and the clauses are their licensors. Syntactically, the Head nouns are predicat...

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several...

Research on filler-gap dependencies has revealed that there are constraints on possible gap sites, and that real-time sentence processing is sensitive to these constraints. This work has shown that comprehenders have preferences for potential gap sites, and immediately detect when these preferences are not met. However, neither the mechanisms that select preferred gap sites nor the mechanisms u...

We define order locality to be a property of clauses relative to a term ordering. This property is a kind of generalization of the subformula property for proofs where terms arising in proofs are bounded, under the given ordering, by terms appearing in the goal clause. We show that when a clause set is order local, then the complexity of its ground entailment problem is a function of its struct...

This paper describes a deterministic method for generating natural language suited to being part of a machine translation system with meaning representations as the level for language transfer. Starting from Davidsonian/Penman meaning representations, syntactic trees are built following the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, from which the yield (i.e., the words) can be taken. The no...

Gupta and Lamping, 1998] show how linear logic based meaning constructors in the glue language semantics of Dalrymple et al., 1996] can be converted to \almost Horn clause" form using the compilation method of Hepple, 1996]. EEcient linear logic deductions deliver skeleton and modiier resources resembling Underspeciied Discourse Representation Structures (UDRSs Reyle, 1993]). In this paper we p...

Comprehension includes interpreting sentences in terms of aspectual categories such as processes (Harry climbed) and culminations (Harry reached the top). Adding a verbal modifier such as for many years to a culmination coerces its interpretation from one to many culminations. Previous studies have found that coercion increases lexical decision and meaning judgment time, but not eye fixation ti...