Construal: Overview,Motivation, and Some New Evidence

Is there underspecification in the syntactic phrase marker constructed during on-linesentence analysis? According to the construal hypothesis (Frazier & Clifton, 1996), avery limited amount and type of structural underspecification is available to the humansentence parsing mechanism. Here we present the basic definitions of construal, illus-trating the theory with some already published evidence. We also discuss several newpieces of evidence, from our laboratory and elsewhere, that support the construal hy-pothesis. We end by raising the question of what kind of mechanism operates in theprocess of interpreting a nonprimary phrase (a phrase that receives an underspecifiedsyntactic analysis), and conclude that it is not a process of competition between multipleactivated possible analyses but instead is a process in which the sheer existence ofambiguity need not result in increased processing cost.