PP attachment and argumenthood

In sentence (1a), the PP with the telescope can be taken to modify the act of seeing, describing the instrument the spy used (a VP-attached reading), or to modify the cop, describing what he or she was holding (an NP-attached reading). In general, sentences of this form are usually not ambiguous once the whole sentence has been processed; for example, in the minimally contrasting sentence (1b) our knowledge of the real world dictates that revolvers cannot be used for seeing, and so the NP-attached reading is forced. But since prepositions like with can be used in various ways, an incremental parser cannot determine which attachment of a PP will be required until the disambiguating noun (e.g., revolver) has been encountered. To the extent that the human sentence processing mechanism attempts to assign a structure and an interpretation to incoming material word-by-word as soon as it is encountered (Marslen-Wilson 1973, 1975; Tyler & Marslen-Wilson 1977; Swinney 1979; Shillcock 1982; Garrod & Sanford 1985; Tanenhaus, Carlson & Seidenberg 1985; etc.), one can ask how it decides which structure to assign upon encountering a partial sentence like The spy saw the cop with: which attachment will it choose for the PP containing with. That is the question I explore in this paper.

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