Evaluating Structural Economy Claims in Relative Clause Attachment
- Aniello De Santo (University of Utah)
- So Young Lee (Miami University)
Abstract
Grillo and Costa (2014) argue for a pseudo- relative (PR) first account of relative clause attachment preferences (RC) such that, when faced with a sentence ambiguous between a PR and a RC interpretation, the parser prefers committing to a PR structure first, thus giving rise to what looks like a high-attachment preference. One possible explanation for this parsing choice is in terms of simplicity of the PR structure, and overall economy principles. Here, we evaluate this hypothesis by testing the predictions of a parser for Minimalist grammars for PR and RC structures in Italian. We discuss the relevance of our results for PR-first explanations of the cross-linguistic variability of RC attachment biases, and highlight the role that computational models can play in evaluating the cognitive plausibility of economy considerations tied to fine-grained structural analyses.
Keywords: Minimalist grammars, Parsing, Economy, Memory, Italian, Attachment Ambiguity
How to Cite:
De Santo, A. & Lee, S., (2022) “Evaluating Structural Economy Claims in Relative Clause Attachment”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 5(1), 65-75. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/qx1z-hs23
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