Abstract This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The gr...

We report the results of experiments designed to investigate the effects of prosodic boundaries on resolving ambiguous syntactic clause boundaries in Japanese. The head-final, prodrop nature of this language generates abundant syntactic attachment ambiguity for sentences that contain relative clauses. Two types of sentences with differing head nouns modified by relative clauses were examined. S...

We investigated the interplay between overt prosodic cues and semantic cues on the structural interpretation of spoken sentences that permit either highor low-attachment of a final relative clause. Prosodic cues were manipulated via the presence or absence of a strong prosodic boundary before the relative clause, and semantic cues were induced via plausibility restrictions (e.g., the servant of...

A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction mad...

Conditional sentences with quantifying expressions are systematically ambigous. In one reading, the if -clause restricts the domain of the overt quantifier; in the other, the if -clause restricts the domain of a covert quantifier, which defaults to epistemic necessity. Although the ambiguity follows directly from the LewisKratzer line on if, it is not generally acknowledged, which has led to ps...

We present the design, implementation and simulation results of a psycholinguistic model of human syntactic processing that meets major empirical criteria. The parser operates in conjunction with a lexicalist grammar and is driven by syntactic information associated with heads of phrases. The dynamics of the model are based on competition by lateral inhibition (`competitive inhibition'). Input ...

The paper deals with the typology of the case marking of semantic core roles. The competing economy considerations of hearer (disambiguation) and speaker (minimal effort) are formalized in terms of evolutionary game theory. It will be shown that the case marking patterns that are attested in the languages of the world are those that are evolutionary stable for different relative weightings of s...