Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: • Do comprehenders bring expectations from the discourse level to bear on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity? • Do these expectations impact online processing? Problem: As comprehenders combine words to form a sentence, they must also combine clauses and sentences to form a coherent discourse. Is the resolution of local syntactic ambiguity sensitive to the process of inferring a coherent discourse? Proposal: Bring together 3 observations about the pragmatic functions of relative clauses (RCs) and the biases associated with implicit causality (IC) verbs, and test whether these types of factors influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity in relative clause attachment: (i) John detests/babysits the children of the musician who… Results: An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced reading study examined comprehenders ' expectations for high/low RC attachments following IC and non-IC verbs. In both studies, IC verbs shifted readers ' attachment preferences from low to high. In the completion study, most high-attaching RCs following IC verbs encoded explanations of the matrix-clause event. These results suggest that comprehenders use pragmatic cues mid-sentence to
Authors: Hannah Rohde, Roger Levy, Andrew Kehler
Institution: University of California San Diego
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1775344268