syntactic parsing two

Question 1

Constraint based Model

Answer 1

Syntactic parsing is determined by a large variety of syntactic, semantic etc influences
Why wouldn’t we use information about the words that we are listening to?
Parsing mechanism uses multiple sources of information to constrain what it thinks the structure might be
Interactive, one-stage model – semantics and syntax operate at same stage

Question 2

Evidence that semantics and context can influence syntactic parsing

Answer 2

1. Taraban: „the thieves stole all the paintings in the museum while the guard slept“ and „the thieves stole all the paintings in the night while the guard slept“
   According to GPM sentence two should be read faster but in fact it was sentence 1.
   1 meets what you expect to hear: easier to process. Meaning of words must therefore be important?
2. Crain and Steedman
   The teachers taught by the Berlitz method passed the test: ppts will usually say this is ungrammatical because teachers are not expected to be taught
   The children taught by the Berlitz method passed the test: ppts see this to be more right because children are expected to be taught.
   The horse raced past the barn fell: assuming there are other horses
   The horse raced past the barn

Question 3

Verb bias

Answer 3

Some verbs can appear in multiple different structures but some are more common than others
„ghost read the book during the plane journey“ read is followed by direct object
„ghost read the book had been burned“ read is followed with sentence complement

Question 4

Pros and cons

Answer 4

1. pros:
   Seem to make a bit more sense
   Evidence that we can consider more than one syntactic analysis a time
   Accounts for that people seem to have individual differences

2.Cons :
Are difficult to test because they don’t make specific predictions

Question 5

Unrestricted race model

Answer 5

Hybrid of GPM and CBM
Uses all sources of information at once (like GPM)
Selects one structure based on evidence (like CBM)
Multiple syntactic and semantic constraints operate at early stage leading to initial interpretation. Second stage allows reanalysis if the first one made no sense