Minimality as vacuous distinctness: Evidence from cross-linguistic sentence comprehension

Abstract Psycholinguistic theorising has long been shaped by the assumption that the processing system endeavours to minimise structures/relations during online comprehension. Within the scope of a recent cross-linguistic, neurocognitive model of sentence comprehension (Bornkessel and Schlesewsky, 2006), we also proposed that the assumption of a very general ‘Minimality’ principle can account for a variety of psycholinguistic findings from a range of languages. In the present paper, we review empirical evidence for this notion of Minimality, before going on to discuss its limitations. On the basis of this discussion, we propose that, rather than constituting an independent processing principle, Minimality should be considered a subcase of a more general requirement for sentential constituents to be distinct from one another. We show that this notion of “Minimality as Distinctness” (MaD) can straightforwardly derive a wide range of findings on cross-linguistic sentence comprehension, while additionally serving to simplify the overall processing architecture.

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