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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
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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

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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.

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