Monotonic Syntactic Processing: A Cross-linguistic Study of Attachment and Reanalysis

Abstract

This paper describes a new addition to the family of parsing models based on the principles of Description Theory (Marcus, Hindle, & Fleck, 1983). We dem onstrate how the de nition of two simple parsing operations, simple attachm ent and tree lowering, which are related to the gramm atical composition operations of substitution and adjunction in the Tree A djoining Grammar formalism, yields a parser which is more constrained than previous Description Theory based models (e.g. Gorrell, 1995a). Since the tree-lowering operation allows the parser to reanalyse in the case of "unconscious" garden paths, it can be used to investigate the consequences of adopting various search strategies for reanalysis, predicting preferences in cases where more than one possibility for reanalysis exists. Considering data from English and Japanese, we show that reanalysis preferences may differ between head-nal and head-initial languages, and suggest some reasons why this m ight be so.