Pozniak, Céline, Hemforth, Barbara, Haendler, Yair et al. (2 more authors) (2019) Seeing events vs. entities:The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses. Journal of Memory and Language. pp. 128-151. ISSN 0749-596X
Abstract
We present the results of three offline questionnaires (one attachment preference study and two acceptability judgments) and two eye-tracking studies in French and English, investigating the resolution of the ambiguity between pseudo relative and relative clause interpretations. This structural and interpretive ambiguity has recently been shown to play a central role in the explanation of apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries in relative clause attachment (Grillo & Costa, 2014; Grillo et al., 2015). This literature has argued that pseudo relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their structural and interpretive simplicity. This paper adds to this growing body of literature in two ways. First we show that, in contrast to previous findings, French speakers prefer to attach relative clauses to the most local antecedent once pseudo relative availability is controlled for. We then provide direct support for the pseudo relative preference: grammatically forced disambiguation to a relative clause interpretation leads to degraded acceptability and greater processing cost in a pseudo relative environment than maintaining compatibility with a pseudo relative.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | (Pseudo) Relative clauses,Ambiguity resolution,Attachment preferences,Economy of computation,Locality,Universality of parsing principles |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > Language and Linguistic Science (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 21 May 2019 11:20 |
Last Modified: | 16 Oct 2024 14:53 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.04.001 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jml.2019.04.001 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:146324 |
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