PREVIEW

In this chapter we explore how non-syntactic information is used in sentence interpretation. By the end of the chapter you should understand that:

• plausibility has an impact on the interpretation of sentences;

• there are differences between individual words of the same grammatical type with respect to the kinds of sentence structures they are found in, and this can affect the comprehension of the sentence;

• the prosodic structure of spoken sentences affects the syntactic structure assigned to the sentences;

• a range of accounts for sentence processing have been proposed which differ in how and when different information sources are used to determine the most appropriate analysis.

Introduction

Chapter 10 considered sentence comprehension from a syntactic point of view. That is, the focus was on how readers and listeners work out the grammatical structures of the sentences they read or hear, without reference to meaning. It was noted that the explicit marking of grammatical structure through function words and grammatical endings facilitates sentence comprehension. The parsing models introduced in that chapter were presented as models that build syntactic sentence trees, based on the grammatical categories of the input words and on the preferred strategies for building such trees. These strategies are based largely on common-sense notions of keeping syntactic structures simple and minimising memory load. The strategies provide an account for the garden path experience that readers (and listeners) have when processing some sentences. Such sentences have structures that are dispreferred by the operations of the parser.