title: Processing cost and its consequences.
abstract: I focus on two challenges that processing-based theories of language must confront: the need to explain why language has the particular properties that it does, and the need to explain why processing pressures are manifested in the particular way that they are. I discuss these matters with reference to two illustrative phenomena: proximity effects in word order and a constraint on contraction.
authors: Department of Linguistics,University of Hawaii at Manoa,Honolulu,HI 96822.ogrady@hawaii.edu.
authors: William
authors: W
authors: O'Grady
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language