A Minimalist Approach to Facilitatory Effects in Stacked Relative Clauses
- Aniello De Santo (University of Utah)
Abstract
A top-down parser for Minimalist grammars (MGs; Stabler, 2013) can successfully predict a variety of off-line processing preferences, via metrics linking parsing behavior to memory load (Kobele et al., 2013; Gerth, 2015; Graf et al., 2017). The increasing empirical coverage of this model is intriguing, given its close association to modern minimalist syntax. Recently however, Zhang (2017) has argued that this framework is unable to account for a set of complexity profiles reported for English and Mandarin Chinese stacked relative clauses. Based on these observations, this paper proposes extensions to this model implementing a notion of memory reactivation, in the form of memory metrics sensitive to repetitions of movement features. We then show how these metrics derive the correct pre- dictions for the stacked RC processing contrasts
Keywords: Minimalist grammars, Parsing, Sentence Processing, Memory, Priming, Stacked Relative Clauses, Syntax, English, Mandarin Chinese
How to Cite:
De Santo, A., (2021) “A Minimalist Approach to Facilitatory Effects in Stacked Relative Clauses”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 4(1), 1-17. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/wbkq-4d49
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