Syntactic Processing

Carlos Acuña-Fariña is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He is the author of top-tier research of a theoretical kind in linguistics and of an experimental kind in both psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. The latter has been done using the methodologies of self-paced reading, eye-tracking and electroencephalography and has mostly covered the topics discussed in this book: relative clause adjunction ambiguities, agreement, gap filling and the relationship between grammars and parsers.

• Acknowledgements1. Introduction1.1. Questions1.2. The functional architecture of the linguistic mind1.3. Minimal attachment1.4. Ambiguity resolution and beyond: the oracle component of parsing2. Modifier adjunction with special reference to relative clauses inside complex NPs2.1. Introduction: local adjunction2.2. Relative clause adjunction2.3. The adjunction of subject relative clauses to complex noun phrases2.3.1. Computationally cheap trees: The Garden Path model2.3.2. The role of frequency: Tuning2.3.3. A refined two-step account: Construal2.3.4. The role of segmentation, prosody and silent reading: the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis2.3.5. Going for the meaning directly: the role of lexical semantics, coherence and reference2.3.6. All at once in one stage: the Constraint Satisfaction Approach2.3.7. The Unrestricted Race model (URM) and the ambiguity advantage effect (AAE)2.3.8. Grillo and Costa (2014): the Pseudo Relative confound2.4. Conclusions3. Agreement3.1. Introduction3.2. Agreement attraction3.2.1. Psycholinguistic theories of agreement 3.2.1.1. Maximal Input3.2.1.2. Marking and Morphing3.2.1.3. The cue-based Working Memory Model: retrieval in production3.2.1.4. The scope of planning + semantic integration account3.2.1.5. On morphology3.2.1.6. Attraction in comprehension 3.3. More on comprehension: agreement in brain waves3.4. Summing up4. Gap filling4.1. Introduction4.2. Working memory4.3. Recent fillers: controlled PRO and gap-driven parsing4.4. Filler-driven parsing: the Active Filler Strategy4.5. Scrambling the word order predictability: the Minimal Chain Principle4.6. Summary and conclusions4.7. Epilogue, or when gaps are too radical and reference must be explicit: anaphor resolution.5. On parsers and grammars 5.1. Introduction: on psychological adequacy5.2. The Separate Grammar Hypothesis: heuristics and good-enough, goal-directed, predictive processing 5.3. The Grammatical Parser Hypothesis: the parser is the grammar5.4. Grammatical Illusions 5.5. On flexibility and opportunism ReferencesIndex