Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-mgxrv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-15T04:10:19.845Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Garden Path Phenomena and the Grammatical Basis of Language Processing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Bradley L. Pritchett
Bradley L. Pritchett*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, 2016 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60201
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A central issue in the field of language processing concerns how grammatical theory and parsing are related. Evidence from processing breakdown (GARDEN PATH phenomena) reveals the conditions under which local ambiguity results in unprocessable sentences. These data provide evidence that the processor operates by admitting structure which maximally satisfies the principles of Government and Binding Theory locally at every point during a parse, and that the constraints on syntactic reanalysis during processing are also derived from grammatical theory. Alternative approaches to parsing are demonstrated to be incapable of accounting for the wide range of garden path effects.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 64 , Issue 3 , September 1988 , pp. 539 - 576
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

* This paper is based upon my 1987 Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation. I would like to thank John Whitman, Susumu Kuno, and Amy Weinberg for many helpful comments on various versions of this manuscript.

References

Abney, Steven. 1986. Licensing and parsing. Paper presented at NELS 17.Google Scholar
Berwick, Robert, and Weinberg, Amy. 1984. The grammatical basis of linguistic performance: Language use and acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Berwick, Robert, and Weinberg, Amy. 1985. Deterministic parsing and linguistic explanation. Language and Cognitive Processes 1. 109–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bever, Thomas. 1968. A survey of some recent work in psycholinguistics. Specification and utilization of a transformational grammar: Scientific report number three, ed. by Plath, W. New Jersey: T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM Corporation.Google Scholar
Bever, Thomas. 1970. The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. Cognition and the development of language, ed. by Hayes, J. R., 279–362. New York: Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Briscoe, E. J. 1983. Determinism and its implementation in PARSIFAL. Automatic natural language parsing, ed. by Jones, Karen Sparck and Wilks, Yorick, 61–68. West Sussex: Ellis Horwood.Google Scholar
Carlson, Greg, and Tannenhaus, Michael. 1988. Thematic roles and language comprehension. Thematic relations, ed. by Wilkens, W. To appear, New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crain, Stephen, and Steedman, Mark. 1985. On not being led up the garden path: the use of context by the psychological syntax processor. Natural language parsing: Psychological, computational, and theoretical perspectives, ed. by Dowty, David, Karttunen, Lauri; and Zwicky, Arnold, 320–358. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Janet. 1985. Deterministic parsing and subjacency. Language and Cognitive Processes 1. 3–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Jerry, Bever, Thomas; and Garrett, Merrill. 1974. The psychology of language. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Ford, M., Bresnan, Joan; and Kaplan, Robert. 1982. A competence-based theory of syntactic closure. The mental representation of grammatical relations, ed. by Bresnan, Joan, 727–796. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Frazier, Lyn. 1987. Syntactic processing: Evidence from Dutch. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5. 519–559.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, Lyn., and Fodor, Janet. 1978. The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition 6. 291–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, Lyn., and Rayner, Keith. 1982. Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology 14. 178–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald, Klein, Ewan, Pullum, Geoffrey; and Sag, Ivan. 1985. Generalized phrase structure grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jenkins, J., Fodor, Jerry A.; and Saporta, Sol. 1965. An introduction to psycholinguistic theory. ms.Google Scholar
Kimball, John. 1973. Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition 2. 15–47.10.1016/0010-0277(72)90028-5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuno, Susumu. 1986. A quasi-stochastic parser. Paper presented at LSA Summer Institute.Google Scholar
Marantz, Alec P. 1984. On the nature of grammatical relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Marcus, Mitchell. 1980. A theory of syntactic recognition for natural language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Marcus, Mitchell, Hindle, Donald; and Fleck, Margaret. 1985. D-Theory: Talking about talking about trees. Ms.Google Scholar
Milne, Robert. 1982. Predicting garden path sentences. Cognitive Science 6. 349–373.Google Scholar
Pritchett, Bradley. 1987. Garden path phenomena and the grammatical basis of language processing. (Harvard University dissertation.) Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.Google Scholar
Pritchett, Bradley. 1988. Garden path phenomena cross-linguistically. Ms.Google Scholar
Stowell, Tim. 1981. Origins of phrase structure. MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Whitman, John B. 1986. A formalism for a modular theory of grammar. Paper presented at the University of Amsterdam Conference on Syntax and the Lexicon.Google Scholar
Williams, Edwin. 1981. Argument structure and morphology. Linguistic Review 1. 81–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar