This paper proposes a structural analysis of two types of wh-question formation in the Austronesian languages Seediq and Tagalog. Wh-questions formed on arguments are pseudo-cleft constructions; the wh-word functions as a predicate taking the rest of the clause, in the form of a headless relative, as its subject. The restriction that argument wh-questions can only be formed on absolutives is ac...

Looking at relative clause extraposition in German as a concrete example, the paper demonstrates how linguistic model building, corpus study and psycholinguistic experiments combine into an integrational research programme that aims at an improved understanding and linguistically as well as cognitively adequate modelling of human language performance. Starting from the word order theory articul...

We examined the production of relative clauses in sentences with a complex noun phrase containing two possible attachment sites for the relative clause (e.g., "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony."). On the basis of two corpus analyses and two sentence continuation tasks, we conclude that much research about this specific syntactic ambiguity has used complex noun phra...

Models of interference in sentence processing claim that object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relatives due to interference between the subject and object noun phrase. The interference effect for object relatives at the verb should be more pronounced when the two noun phrases retrieved from memory are similar. To test this, two eye tracking experiments manipulated whether ...

An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The amb...

This paper shows how to apply a particular chance-credence principle, called the General Principle, to the case of two divergent level-relative chances of a given proposition in order to single out level-relative chance that should underpin one’s credence in that proposition. It is shown that the key move hinges on the use of admissibility clause in the GP. This principle is, then, tested again...

Bresnan's Endocentric Mapping Principles (Bresnan, 2001) are used as diagnostics to demonstrate that the Mandarin relative clause structure is an endocentric one, in which the particle de is the sole functional and c-structural head, and the modified noun is one of two specifiers. The relative clause occupies a phraseinitial specifier position associated with a Modifier DF, and the final NP occ...

The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two selfpaced reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. Recent constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution have proposed that for a reduced relative clause (e.g., ‘‘The room searched by the police was . . .’’), both the participle and past tense forms of the ambiguous verb (‘‘searched’’) a...

the present study attempts to investigate parsing preferences (early vs. late closure) of native and l2 learners of both english and persian when they read ambiguous relative clauses. the purpose is to find out if l2 learners process l2 linguistic input in the way monolingual speakers of that language do. the participants took tests including 10 test sentences plus 10 distractors, each followed...