THE ROLE OF LEXICAL HEADS IN PARSING - EVIDENCE FROM GERMAN

Theories of sentence processing can be classified by the role that lex ical heads play in first-pass parsing. In some theories, syntactic str ucture cannot even be built before it is licensed by a head (Abney, 19 89; Prichett, 1992), whereas in other models, at the opposite extreme, only major category information in lexical items is used during the r ule-based initial structure building process (Ferreira & Henderson, 19 90; Mitchell, 1987). In this paper, we will introduce a fully incremen tal model that accounts for attachment preferences by the linear order of lexical heads in the surface structure and their thematic properti es. The principle of ''parameterised head attachment'' and a serial va riant, the SOUL mechanism, will be discussed on the basis of three on- line experiments on NP- and PP-attachment in German verb-second and ve rb-final sentences.