Highs and Lows in English Attachment.
Grillo and Costa (2014) claim that Relative-Clause attachment ambiguity resolution is largely dependent on whether or not a Pseudo-Relative interpretation is available. Data from Italian, and other languages allowing Pseudo-Relatives, support this hypothesis. Pseudo-Relative availability, however, covaries with the semantics of the main predicate (e.g., perceptual vs. stative). Experiment 1 assesses whether this predicate distinction alone can account for prior attachment results by testing it with a language that disallows Pseudo-Relatives (i.e. English). Low Attachment was found independent of Predicate-Type. Predicate-Type did however have a minor modulatory role. Experiment 2 shows that English, traditionally classified as a Low Attachment language, can demonstrate High Attachment with sentences globally ambiguous between a Small-Clause and a reduced Relative-Clause interpretation. These results support a grammatical account of previous effects and provide novel evidence for the parser's preference of a Small-Clause over a Restrictive interpretation, crosslinguistically.
Institut für Linguistik: Anglistik, Universität Stuttgart, Germany. Electronic address: nino@ifla.uni-stuttgart.de.
Nino
N
Grillo
Centro de Linguística da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Electronic address: jcosta@fcsh.unl.pt.
João
J
Costa
Centro de Linguística da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Electronic address: bruno86fernandes@gmail.com.
Bruno
B
Fernandes
Department of Linguistics, University College London, United Kingdom. Electronic address: a.santi@ucl.ac.uk.
Andrea
A
Santi
D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D011932:Reading
Attachment preferences; Parsing Universals; Pseudo Relative Small Clauses; Relative Clauses; Sentence processing