Challenges to Recent Theories of Crosslinguistic Variation in Parsing: Evidence from Dutch (original) (raw)

Modifier attachment in sentence parsing: Evidence from Dutch

Ka tholieke U niversiteit Leuven, Leuven, B elgium D on C. M itchell U niversity of E xeter, E xeter, U.K. C u r ren t th eories of p arsin g su ggest a w ide variety of m echa nism s by w hich m od i® er s, su ch as re lative clauses, m ay be r elated to con stitu en ts tha t offer m ore th an on e p oten tial attach m en t site. S om e, like th e tu n ing h yp oth esis, are based on th e p re m ise th at p eop le' s p arsin g perfo r m an ce is sh ap ed by p rior expo su re to lang u age. O th er s (e.g. g ard en -p ath th eory an d con str ua l th eory ) play d ow n any p oten tial ro le of p ast lingu istic exp erien ce, stre ssin g instead th e vary ing in¯u en ces of stru ctu ral ch ara cteristics of th e s enten ce in qu estion . T he two view s encou ra ge d ifferin g exp ectation s abou t cros s-lin gu istic variatio n in pa rsing p referen ce. A qu estion n aire stu dy an d tw o on -line experim en ts w ere carried ou t to investigate attach m en t pre feren ces in D u tch . T h e resu lts p ose a num ber of pr oblem s for the m ajority of the existing pa rsing m od els and are clearly incon sis ten t w ith so m e of th e trad ition al th eories. In con trast, th e ® n d ings are com p atible w ith m od els incorp ora ting p arsin g m echa nism s th at are tu ned by lang u age experien ce. T h e resu lts h ighligh t th e n eed for fur ther cor p us stu d ies to sub ject th ese accou n ts to m ore search ing scru tiny.

Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in L2 Parsing: Effects of Prosodic Boundaries and Constituent Length

Crosslinguistic differences in relative clause attachment * Crosslinguistic differences in parsing preferences for ambiguous sentences are well known. A much-studied case involves relative clauses. In sentences like (1a), the relative clause (RC) who was on the balcony can be interpreted as referring either to the first NP (NP1, the servant) (see bracketing in (1b)) or to the second NP (NP2, the actress) (see (1c)). Previous research has reported that, in languages like English, speakers show a low attachment preference when interpreting such sentences, taking the relative clause to modify NP2, the actress. In languages like Spanish, on the other hand, high attachment is preferred in equivalent sentences, such that the relative clause modifies NP1, the servant (Cuetos & Mitchell 1988). (1) a. Someone spoke to the servant of the actress who was on the balcony NP1 NP2 RC b. Someone spoke to [[the servant [of the actress]] [who was on the balcony]] c. Someone spoke to [the servant [of the actress [who was on the balcony]]] * We thank the audiences at GALANA 5 and BUCLD 37 for their comments. We are grateful for support from SSHRCC and FQRSC.

Interpretation of Leftward-Moved Constituents: Processing Topicalizations in German

Linguistics, 2000

Five experiments were conducted on German topicalization sentences to explore their interpretation and the relation between the syntactic representation and the discourse representation of the sentence. It is proposed that a DP is rapidly instantiated as a discourse entity in the discourse representation whereas a NP is simply treated as a property. If the postulated discourse entity corresponding to the DP in SpecCP of a topicalized sentence must be retracted due to the occurrence of a later determiner (in split-topicalization) or due to the need to scope under a subsequent quantifier, the sentence should be di‰cult to process. These predictions were confirmed in two di‰culty judgment experiments and in an experiment where participants selected the first interpretation assigned to a scopally ambiguous sentence involving an adverbial quantifier. However, in a separate experiment, where scope ambiguities involving determiner quantifiers were tested, the preference for the discourse instantiated DP to take wide scope disappeared. Another di‰culty judgment experiment revealed substantial di‰culty for sentences containing ''mixed chains'' where a DP moves and then a NP moves out of the moved DP. This di‰culty was not observed in corresponding sentences containing essentially the same lexical content in the same positions but without the movement responsible for creating the mixed chain.

The correspondence between sentence production and corpus frequencies in modifier attachment

2002

We examined the production of relative clauses in sentences with a complex noun phrase containing two possible attachment sites for the relative clause (eg,“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 phrases that are quite uncommon.

The influence of referential discourse context on modifier attachment in Dutch

2002

Abstract In an eye-tracking experiment we investigated the influence of referential context on the attachment of a relative clause to two possible hosts (as in “Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony”). The attachment of the relative clause was disambiguated grammatically at the first word after the onset of the ambiguity in order to investigate immediate effects of discourse.