Lexical structure and parsing complexity

In recent work on sentence processing, lexical frequencies have been proposed as a primary mechanism for syntactic and lexical disam biguation. In this paper, we instead focus on the consequences that the structural configuration of lexical knowledge has for the timecourse of parsing. We concentrate on reduced relative clauses and propose a new lexical-structural analysis for those verbs that are difficult in this construction, manner of motion verbs. The interaction between the proposed lexical structure and the com petitive attachment parser (Stevenson, 1994b) explains the persistent difficulty of this construction with a manner of motion verb, even in disambiguating contexts (e.g. a reduced relative in object position) or with non-am biguous past participle verb forms. W eighted influences on the activation competition are possible with other verbs, and the model can therefore also explain data that dem onstrate contextual effects on reduced relatives with sim ple transitives. Consequences for the freq...

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