PROCESSING LOCAL AND UNBOUNDED DEPENDENCIES - A UNIFIED ACCOUNT

This paper proposes an account of incremental sentence processing and the initial stage of syntactic ambiguity resolution based on the claim that the processor seek; to provide semantic interpretations for sent ence fragments as soon as it possibly can. In this model, there is no fundamental distinction between local and unbounded dependencies. The processor employs a version of categorial grammar based on dependency grammar, in which dependency constituents are derived from dependencie s between words and are permitted to overlap. The processor seeks to f orm dependency constituents as soon as it can, and to give interpretat ions to these fragments immediately. The initial stage of ambiguity re solution is determined by the principle of dependency formation, under which the processor automatically chooses an analysis that allows a s ingle dependency constituent to be formed in preference to one that do es not The motivation is semantic: Such an analysis maximizes the amou nt of incremental interpretation that is possible. But if more than on e analysis is compatible with the formation of a single constituent, t he processor can appeal to a range of sources of nonsyntactic informat ion in making ifs choice. I show how this account can capture a range of psycholinguistic evidence without positing any fundamental distinct ion between local and unbounded dependencies.