Recent research has indicated that a verb’s preferential subcategorization frame plays a fundamental role in guiding the choice of the type of complement that follows a verb. For example, sentences with a sentential complement-biased verb, such as “admitted”, will cause less processing difficulties when it is followed by a sentential complement than when it is followed by a direct object. Such ...

This paper investigates non-destructive simplification, a type of syntactic text simplification which focuses on extracting embedded clauses from structurally complex sentences and rephrasing them without affecting their original meaning. This process reduces the average sentence length and complexity to make text simpler. Although relevant for human readers with low reading skills or language ...

Relative clauses (RC) are among the most well-studied constructions in the field of psycholinguistics. A wide variety of work explores a robust processing asymmetry such that subject relatives (SRs) are easier to process than object relatives (ORs). For example, English shows a subject advantage, as demonstrated by a number of studies involving different measures including: self-paced reading (...

We apply the C4.5 decision tree learner in interpreting Japanese relative clause constructions, based around shallow syntactic and semantic processing. In parameterising data for use with C4.5, we propose and test various means of reducing intraclausal interpretational ambiguity, and cross indexing the overall analysis of cosubordinated relative clause constructions. We additionally investigate...

We show that comprehenders' expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced rea...

This paper discusses a special kind of syntax-semantics mismatch: a noun with a relative clause is interpreted as if it were a complement clause. An analysis in terms of Lexical Resource Semantics is developed which provides a uniform account for “normal” relative clauses and for the discussed type of relative clause.

A headed relative clause is a syntactically complex modifier involving abstraction over an internal position of the clause (the relativization site) and connected to some constituent it modifies (the relative ''head''). In the standard approach, abstraction is syntactically implemented by means of an unbounded dependency between the relativization site and a relative operator taking scope over ...