PARSING THEORY AND PHRASE-ORDER VARIATION IN GERMAN V2 CLAUSES

This paper examines the syntactic processing of structural ambiguities in German verb-second (V2) clauses. It is argued that the proposal of Grimshaw (1991, 1993) that CP and IP are verbal ''extended projection s'' allows an incremental parse of these ambiguities which is consiste nt with the principles of simplicity (no vacuous structure building) a nd structural determinism (computed dominance and precedence relations cannot be altered by parser-internal operations) proposed in Gorrell (1995). It is argued that the ambiguities discussed here provide evide nce against the hypothesis that the parser's initial attachment decisi ons follow from a maximal-licensing principle rather than a preference for minimal structure (Pritchett, 1992). Further, it is argued that, contra Fodor and Inoue (1994), theories of syntactic processing must n ot only incorporate some mechanism for resolving conflicts between new input and computed structure, but also distinguish the comparative co sts of different reanalysis types.