Syntax and Parsing

An examination of the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension.

Paul Gorrell (Author)

9780521452823, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 April 1995

196 pages
23.8 x 15.9 x 1.7 cm, 0.421 kg

This book examines the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension, and argues for a distinct processing component which is devoted to the recovery of syntactic structure and which utilizes the contrasting types of information found within a Government-Binding grammar. Paul Gorrell contrasts the primary relations (dominance and precedence) and secondary relations (case assignment, theta-role assignment, etc.) in a phrase-structure tree, and shows how this computational distinction of information types is reflected in the internal structure of the parser, which consists of two sub-components: a structure builder (responsible for creating nodes in a tree and positing primary relations between them), and a structure interpreter (responsible for analysing the tree in terms of secondary relations). This model can also predict garden-path phenomena in the processing of verb-final clauses.

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Properties of the grammar
3. Analyses of previous work
4. Properties of the parser
5. Modularity and structural determinism
6. Conclusion
Reference
Index.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK]