Lexical Preference and Global Structure Contributions to Syntactic Choice in Sentence Production

When people decide how to express a message, they have to choose among different sentence structures. These choices are affected by lexical factors (such as whether a verb is more commonly associated with one structure than another) and by structural factors, such as the overall preference for one structure over another. After reviewing the psycholinguistic literature, we discuss a range of grammars that make use of lexical information in syntactic structure building. We then discuss recent psycholinguistic evidence that suggests that choice of structure depends on lexical information and on the global syntactic environment.

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