Abstract
The paper looks at the varying degree of incrementality in online sentence processing. A model that captures such differences by reference to the type of constituents involved is Construal. Construal assumes different mechanisms for the processing of complements (primary relations) and adjuncts (non-primary relations). According to Construal, adjuncts, in contrast to complements, are not immediately attached to the current phrase structure, but loosely associated with it, and are interpreted within the current thematic processing domain. We compare Construal to an alternative approach, the Enlightened Incrementality Conjecture (EIC) that explains the differing degree of incrementality in sentence processing by reference to domains of Logical Form, and evaluate these two accounts in the light of results from processing order variations with complements and adjuncts in German.
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Notes
- 1.
For German, a widely accepted assumption with regard to phrase structure is a direct mapping of the thematic structure, encoded in the verb’s lexical entry, onto the syntactic structure. The highest ranked argument, in our examples the subject, ends up in the highest position of the VP (see e.g., Haider, 1993).
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Stolterfoht, B., Gauza, H., Störzer, M. (2019). Incrementality in Processing Complements and Adjuncts: Construal Revisited. In: Carlson, K., Clifton, Jr., C., Fodor, J. (eds) Grammatical Approaches to Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01563-3_12
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