This dissertation is a defense of the hypothesis that the noun phrase is headed by afunctional element (i.e., \non-lexical " category) D, identi ed with the determiner. In this way, the structure of the noun phrase parallels that of the sentence, which is headed by In (ection), under assumptions now standard within the Government-Binding (GB) framework. The central empirical problem addressed is the question of the proper analysis of the so-called \Poss-ing " gerund in English. This construction possesses simultaneously many properties of sentences, and many properties of noun phrases. The problem of capturing this dual aspect of the Possing construction is heightened by current restrictive views of X-bar theory, which, in particular, rule out the obvious structure for Poss-ing, [NP NP VPing], by virtue of its exocentricity. Consideration of languages in which nouns, even the most basic concrete nouns, show agreement (AGR) with their possessors, points to an analysis

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This thesis presents NL-Soar, a detailed computational model of human sentence comprehension that accounts for a broad range of psycholinguistic phenomena. NL-Soar provides in-depth accounts of structural ambiguity resolution, garden path effects, unproblematic ambiguities, parsing breakdown on difficult embeddings, acceptable embeddings, immediacy of interpretation, and the time course of comprehension. The model explains a variety of both modular and interactive effects, and shows how learning can affect ambiguity resolution behavior. In addition to accounting for the qualitative phenomena surrounding parsing breakdown and garden path effects, NL-Soar explains a wide range of contrasts between garden paths and unproblematic ambiguities, and difficult and acceptable embeddings: the theory has been applied in detail to over 100 types of structures representing these contrasts, with a success rate of about 90%. The account of real-time immediacy includes predictions about the time course of comprehension and a zero-parameter prediction about the average rate of skilled comprehension. Finally, the theory has been successfully applied to a suggestive range of cross-linguistic examples, including constructions from head-final languages such as Japanese.

We present a detailed process theory of the moment-by-moment working-memory retrievals and associated control structure that subserve sentence comprehension. The theory is derived from the application of independently motivated principles of memory and cognitive skill to the specialized task of sentence parsing. The resulting theory construes sentence processing as a series of skilled associative memory retrievals modulated by similarity-based interference and fluctuating activation. The cognitive principles are formalized in computational form in the Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational (ACT–R) architecture, and our process model is realized in ACT–R. We present the results of 6 sets of simulations: 5 simulation sets provide quantitative accounts of the effects of length and structural interference on both unambiguous and garden-path structures. A final simulation set provides a graded taxonomy of double center embeddings ranging from relatively easy to extremely difficult. The explanation of center-embedding difficulty is a novel one that derives from the model’s complete reliance on discriminating retrieval cues in the absence of an explicit representation of serial order information. All fits were obtained with only 1 free scaling parameter fixed across the simulations; all other parameters were ACT–R defaults. The modeling results support the hypothesis that fluctuating activation and similarity-based interference are the key factors shaping working memory in sentence processing. We contrast the theory and empirical predictions with several related accounts of sentence-processing complexity.

While there is no interesting limitation on the degree of right-embedding in acceptable sentences, center-embedding is quite severely restricted. Similarly, while there is no interesting bound on the number of nouns that can occur in acceptable noun compounds, there is a very low bound on the number of causative morphemes that can occur in the verb compounds of agglutinative languages. Turning to the clause-final verb clusters of West Germanic languages, we find another similar bound. A cluster including verbs from one embedded clause may beacceptable, but clusters formed from the verbs of two or three or even more deeply embedded clauses are much more awkward (regardless of whether the subject-verb dependencies are crossing or nested). And in languages that allow multiple wh-extractions from a single clause, extractions of more than one element with a given case quickly become unacceptable. More careful experimental study of the nature of these limitations is needed, in a range of languages, but here a preliminary attempt is made to subsume them all under a single generalization, a version of the familar idea that the human parsing

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What precisely is the universal nature of the human syntactic parser, such that it copes easily with some embedded structures, yet fails so dramatically on others (e.g., classic double center-embeddings)? A theory is proposed in the form of an architecture for parsing based on two simple ideas. The first is that human short-term memory is an indexing structure which can give rise to interference effects (storage limitations) when contents overlap with respect to the indices. For parsing, the contents are syntactic structures, and the indices are potential structural relations. The second idea is that the capacity of STM is the minimum capacity required to support the basic functions of parsing. The theory successfully accounts for the contrasts between over 50 difficult and acceptable constructions from English, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish. The theory has independent psychological and computational motivation, and is a functional part of a broader cognitive ...

It is argued in this article that Dutch is a head initial language. The SVO order of Dutch main clauses is derived from an ‘underlying ’ SOV order, visible in embedded clauses (Koster 1975). However, this SOV order is again derived from an underlying SVO order in the Dutch VP, still visible when the verb’s complement is not a noun phrase but a clause. If the verb takes a Small Clause complement, the Small Clause predicate moves leftward to a position in the functional domain, and the subject of the Small Clause, like a complement noun phrase, moves to the specifier position of AgrOP. The analysis supports the hypothesis that movement in the world’s languages is invariably leftward (Kayne 1992). In an inspiring guest lecture at the GLOW Colloquium in Lisbon, 1992, Richard Kayne argued that movement of syntactic constituents is invariably leftward (Kayne 1992). In combination with Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, in which movement invariably targets heads and specifiers in the functional domain (Chomsky 1992), Kayne’s observation leads to the conclusion that functional heads and specifiers of functional projections are always on the left side in a syntactic tree structure. Hence, if Kayne and Chomsky are correct, structure building operations in all languages follow the same, universal blueprint (illustrated in 1). (1) XP specifier X’

It is possible within Tree Adjoining Grammar to reproduce many of the syntactic analyses originally formulated by linguists in transformational terms. Tothe extent that these analyses are well-motivated empirically, this fact makes TAG interesting for use in developing computational learning and processing models (Joshi 1990, Frank 1992, Rambow 1994), since the use of other non-transformational formalisms sometimes forces choices of linguistic description different from those ordinarily made by descriptive syntacticians. Thus, using TAG, one can takeadvantage in the construction of parsers and learners of the computational tractability of a mathematically restrictive formalism without having to reinvent empirical syntax in order to do so. At the same time, TAG analyses are not identical in every detail to their transformational counterparts; and it is interesting to compare them where they diverge. The differences arise because of a fundamental difference in the way that synt...

This paper defends the thesis that in German all sentential arguments occurring in sentenceinitial position have undergone obligatory left dislocation. This implies that the Vorfeld is unable to be occupied by sentential arguments. The resumptive pronoun that immediately follows the left-dislocated phrase may be deleted in accordance with the conditions on Topic Drop that hold for German (cf. Oppenrieder 1991). The analysis, which is formulated in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, accounts for the absence of sentential arguments in the Vorfeld as well as several related phenomena. 2 Basic Facts