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.
| ISBN: | 9780521024099 |
| Publication date: | 13th February 2006 |
| Author: | Paul Universität Potsdam, Germany Gorrell |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 196 pages |
| Series: | Cambridge Studies in Linguistics |
| Genres: |
Grammar, syntax and morphology |