Challenges To Recent Theories Of Crosslinguistic Variation In Parsing: Evidence From Dutch

Abstract

This chapter examines an aspect of parsing in which widely accepted generalizations have turned out to be inaccurate or incomplete and in which languages other than English appear to operate according to principles previously unexplored in mainstream research. It outlines evidence showing how the characteristics of site selection vary from language to language, and reviews a variety of theoretical proposals that have been put forward in attempts to explain these differences. The chapter then proceeds to examine these proposals and discusses their status in the light of recent psycholinguistic work. The chapter outlines a number of new studies in Dutch and spells out the theoretical implications of these data. The work on languages other than English has made it abundantly clear that any viable theory of syntactic analysis has to postulate something over and above a proximity or recency principle to account for RC-attachment findings in most languages.

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