When people create linguistic expressions, they should avoid ambiguity. Current evidence on this is mixed. In two experiments, subjects read sentences including passive relative clauses, which can be written in full or reduced form (The team (that was) defeated in the Super Bowl vowed revenge); when reduced (without the that was), ambiguity is a threat. Subjects were told about the optional mat...

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...

We present a large (65 million words of Wall Street Journal) and in-depth corpus study of a particular syntactic ambiguity to investigate (1) to what extent the structure of a grammar is reeected in a corpus, and (2) how probability functions deened according to a grammar t independently established measures of syntactic disambiguation preference. We look at the well-known case of the ambiguity...

To resolve structural ambiguities in syntactic analysis of natural language, which are caused by prepositional phrase attachment, relative clause attachment, and so on, we developed an experimental system called tile Dependency Anal!lzcr. The system uses instances of dependency structures extracted froth a terminology dictionary as a knowledge ba.~e. Structural (attachment) ambiguity is represe...

The study discusses the role of prosodic grouping in the Mandarin Relative Clause attachment disambiguation. The grouping effect is explored under the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) from four aspects of sentence processing experiments: default production, contrast production, online processing, as well as offline processing. It is found that (1) the length of RC greatly impacts ambiguity res...

there are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. the former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. this study explores how relative importance is realized in english and persian. it also investigates how advanced persian learne...

In this paper, I investigate the interaction of clause-modifying adjuncts, such as because clauses, with negation and the licensing of negative polarity items. I show how an account in which because clauses are adjuncts which can be basegenerated adjoined to either IP or VP explains the ambiguity of examples containing because clauses and negation, and how, in conjunction with the roofing theor...

In dependency parsing of long sentences with fewer subjects than predicates, it is difficult to recognize which predicate governs which subject. To handle such syntactic ambiguity between subjects and predicates, this paper proposes an “Sclause” segmentation method, where an S(ubject)clause is defined as a group of words containing several predicates and their common subject. We propose an auto...