Syntax and Parsing

In this examination of the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension, Paul Gorrell argues for a distinct processing component that is devoted to the recovery of syntactic structure and that utilizes the contrasting types of information found within a GovernmentSHBinding grammar. He contrasts the primary and secondary relations in a phrase-structure tree, and shows how this distinction is reflected in the internal structure of the parser, a model that can also predict garden-path phenomena in the processing of verb-final clauses.