Abstract
Forster's (1979) proposals regarding the autonomy of syntax and his explanation of experiments that support the alternative interactive theory of syntactic analysis are briefly reviewed. It is argued that a slightly different account is consistent with evidence from neuropsychology. On the basis of the work of Linebarger, Schwartz, and Saffran (1983) with agrammatics, a distinction is drawn between a sentence's syntactic representation and its propositional representation. The suggestion is that the processor responsible for assigning case roles within a proposition has access to semantic and pragmatic information as well as to a purely syntatic representation. In this way, certain top-down effects in sentence processing can be comfortably accommodated without violating the autonomy of the syntactic representation.
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Hanley, J.R. Semantic heuristics, syntactic analysis, and case-role assignment. J Psycholinguist Res 16, 329–334 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01069286
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01069286