Abstract

In this paper we discuss the following issue: How do we decide whether a certain property of language is a competence property or a performance property? Our claim is that the answer to this question is not given apriori. The answer depends on the formal devices (formal grammars and machines) available to us for describing language. We discuss this issue in the context of the complexity of processing of center embedding (of relative clauses in English) and scrambling (in German, for example) from arbitrary depths of embedding. 1 Introduction How do we decide whether a certain property of language is a competence property or a performance property? This is an old question. In this pa- The authors want to thank two referees of this paper for the very valuable comments, which helped to improve both the content and presentation of this paper. This work was partially supported by NSF Grant SBR8920230 and ARO Grant DAAH0404-94GE -0426. 2 / per, we will investigate this question in th...

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