This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory -- the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT) -- has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is

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 grammar presented here provides an account of extraction, pied piping and relative clause `stacking' without appeal to transformational operations, transderivational competition, or invisible (`empty') categories of any kind.

this paper is to introduce, by means of the detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem, the rudiments of a grammatical theory which assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. 2 This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English as illustrated in (1), and the more idiomatic patterns, such as those exemplified in (2), stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar must provide an account. (1) a What have you done? b Never will I leave you. c So will she. d Long may you prosper! e Had I known, . . . f Am I tired! g . . . as were the others h Thus did the hen reward Beecher. (2) a by and large b [to] have a field day c [to] have to hand it to [someone] d (*A/*The) Fool that I was, . . . e in x's own right Given such a commitment, the construction grammarian is required to develop an explicit system of representation, capable of encoding economically and without loss of generalization, all the constructions (or patterns) of the language, from the most idiomatic to the most general. This goal was advanced in the form of a promissory note in an earlier paper that dealt with the English let alone construction: "It appears to us that the machinery needed for describing the so-called minor or peripheral constructions of the sort which has occupied us here will have 1 The authors gratefully acknowledge much fruitful discussion regarding the content of this paper with Mary Catherine O'Connor. We are indebted to Yunsook Chung, Ron Kaplan, Ray Jackendoff, Susanne Riehemann and Ivan Sag for comments on earlier dr...

Abstract. In this paper, we present a unified feature-based theory of complement, adjunct, and subject extraction, in which there is no need either for valence reducing lexical rules or for phonologically null traces. Our analysis rests on the assumption that the mapping between argument structure and valence is defined by realization constraints which are satisfied by all lexical heads. Arguments can be realized as local dependents, in which case they are selected via the head’s valence features. Alternatively, arguments may be realized in a long-distance dependency construction, in which case they are selected via the head’s SLASH features. Furthermore, we argue that in English post-verbal adjuncts, as well as complements, are syntactic dependents selected by the verb, thus providing a uniform analysis of complement and adjunct extraction. Finally, we provide an alternative treatment of subject extraction which is subsumed by our general analysis and offer a new account of the that-trace effect. 1.

We report the results from three cross-modal lexical decision experiments investigating antecedent priming effects in Japanese. In the first two experiments we examined antecedent reactivation at the preverbal trace position in long-distance scrambling sentences. We found an interaction between the participants' working memory (WM) span and antecedent priming. For the High Span Group, the magnitude of antecedent priming at the trace position was significantly larger than at the earlier control position; for the Low Span Group, on the other hand, there was no such difference. In a third experiment, we examined whether similar reactivation effects cotfid be observed for argument expressions that are not base-generated adjacent to the verb. Contrary to scrambled objects, subject NPs in canonically ordered sentences were not reactivated at the preverbal test position in either of the two participant groups. We argue that the priming effect observed in the High Span Group supports a trace-based account of long-distance scrambling. The degree of complexity of the experimental sentences was such, however, that they exceeded the memory span of the Low Span Group. We conclude that argument traces access their antecedents irrespective of the position of their subcategorizers.

In Chomsky's theory of grammar, syntactic representations are said to contain movement traces, i.e., syntactically active but phonetically null copies of displaced constituents. Correspondingly, traces have been claimed to form part of the processing of sentence structure by showing that at trace sites the parser reactivates a moved constituent. This view has been contested, however, by researchers arguing that experimental findings can better be explained in terms of direct associations between subcategorizers and arguments. Against this background, we investigate antecedent reactivation effects in scrambled double-object constructions of German in two cross-modal priming experiments. We found significant priming effects at positions at which a movement analysis of these constructions would postulate an empty category, thus suggesting that the antecedent is indeed reactivated at the gap position. The Direct Association Hypothesis, on the other hand, cannot account for the priming effects we found. Implications for processing and for syntactic analyses of scrambling in German will be discussed. One phenomenon that has raised considerable interest among syntacticians and psycholinguists is that of syntactic dependencies or chains, i.e., sentences in which two or more nonadjacent elements are syntactically linked in some way, such as through movement, control, coindexation, and binding. The notion of movement chains is particularly controversial both in the syn-

This article presents two self-paced reading experiments which investigate the role of storage costs associated with maintaining incomplete syntactic dependencies in structural ambiguity resolution. We argue that previous work has been equivocal regarding syntactic influences because it has examined ambiguities where there is little or no resource differential between competing alternatives. The candidate structures of the ambiguities explored here incur substantially different storage costs. The results indicate that storage-based biases can be sufficiently powerful to create difficulty for a structural alternative even when it is promoted by nonsyntactic factors. These findings are incorporated into a model of ambiguity resolution in which structural biases operate as independent graded constraints in selecting between structural alternatives.

This paper investigates the processing of long-distance filler-gap dependencies in Japanese, a strongly head-final language. Two self-paced reading experiments and one sentence completion study show that Japanese readers associate a fronted wh-phrase with the most deeply embedded clause of a multi-clause sentence. Experiment 1 demonstrates this using evidence that readers expect to encounter a scope-marking affix on the verb of an embedded clause in wh-fronting constructions. Experiment 2 shows that the wh-phrase is already associated with the embedded clause before the embedded verb is processed, based on a Japanese counterpart of the Filled Gap Effect (Stowe, 1986). Experiment 3 corroborates these findings in a sentence completion study. These findings clarify the factors responsible for Ôactive fillerÕ effects in processing long-distance dependencies (Crain & Fodor, 1985; Fodor, 1978; Frazier & Clifton, 1989; Stowe, 1986) in ways not possible in head-initial languages. The results provide evidence that the processing of filler-gap dependencies is driven by the need to satisfy thematic role requirements of the fronted phrase, rather than by the need to create a gap as soon as possible. The paper also discusses implications of these findings for theories of reanalysis.

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This paper presents three self-paced, word-by-word reading experiments that test for the existence of on-line syntactic storage costs in English. To investigate this issue, we compared reading times for sentence regions in which storage costs varied, keeping other factors constant. Experiment 1 manipulated the number of verbs needed to form a grammatical sentence. Experiment 2 investigated whether filler-gap dependencies incur storage costs, and Experiment 3 investigated whether prepositional phrase arguments of verbs incur storage costs. The results of all three experiments demonstrate the role of online storage costs in sentence comprehension. Taken together with other results in the literature, the results also support a theory of sentence comprehension which includes empty categories mediating filler-gap dependencies. 2