Abstract for Shukhan Ng and Janet Dean Fodor's talk

Parsing empty categories in a mixed-headed language
Shukhan Ng and Janet Dean Fodor (CUNY Graduate Center)
September 18, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Early studies of processing head-final and mixed-headed languages focused on the richness of the information afforded by phrasal heads and how crucially the parser needs that information in order to be able to structure other elements of the sentence. But also, headedness differences can be exploited for psycholinguistic purposes to create novel types of ambiguity that raise processing issues not previously studied. In this talk we exploit the mixed headedness of Mandarin Chinese to explore the interplay between phrase structure assignment and empty category interpretation.

An empty category (EC) may be interpreted via discourse (pro) or control (PRO) or binding (trace). EC differences are accompanied by phrase structure differences (main / complement / relative clause)1. Thus, on-line sentence processing can be subject to both EC-interpretation pressures and structure-building pressures. We will present two experiments which investigate how the parser resolves conflicts between them. The results (from sentence completion and self-paced reading) show that EC-interpretation preferences can sometimes outweigh structure-building preferences.