Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
1.1. Questions
1.2. The functional architecture of the linguistic mind
1.3. Minimal attachment
1.4. Ambiguity resolution and beyond: the oracle component of parsing
2. Modifier adjunction with special reference to relative clauses inside complex NPs
2.1. Introduction: local adjunction
2.2. Relative clause adjunction
2.3. The adjunction of subject relative clauses to complex noun phrases
2.3.1. Computationally cheap trees: The Garden Path model
2.3.2. The role of frequency: Tuning
2.3.3. A refined two-step account: Construal
2.3.4. The role of segmentation, prosody and silent reading: the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis
2.3.5. Going for the meaning directly: the role of lexical semantics, coherence and reference
2.3.6. All at once in one stage: the Constraint Satisfaction Approach
2.3.7. The Unrestricted Race model (URM) and the ambiguity advantage effect (AAE)
2.3.8. Grillo and Costa (2014): the Pseudo Relative confound
2.4. Conclusions
3. Agreement
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Agreement attraction
3.2.1. Psycholinguistic theories of agreement
3.2.1.1. Maximal Input
3.2.1.2. Marking and Morphing
3.2.1.3. The cue-based Working Memory Model: retrieval in production
3.2.1.4. The scope of planning + semantic integration account
3.2.1.5. On morphology
3.2.1.6. Attraction in comprehension
3.3. More on comprehension: agreement in brain waves
3.4. Summing up
4. Gap filling
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Working memory
4.3. Recent fillers: controlled PRO and gap-driven parsing
4.4. Filler-driven parsing: the Active Filler Strategy
4.5. Scrambling the word order predictability: the Minimal Chain Principle
4.6. Summary and conclusions
4.7. Epilogue, or when gaps are too radical and reference must be explicit: anaphor resolution.
5. On parsers and grammars
5.1. Introduction: on psychological adequacy
5.2. The Separate Grammar Hypothesis: heuristics and good-enough, goal-directed, predictive processing
5.3. The Grammatical Parser Hypothesis: the parser is the grammar
5.4. Grammatical Illusions
5.5. On flexibility and opportunism
References
Index
Biography
Carlos Acuña-Fariña is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He is the author of top-tier research of a theoretical kind in linguistics and of an experimental kind in both psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. The latter has been done using the methodologies of self-paced reading, eye-tracking and electroencephalography and has mostly covered the topics discussed in this book: relative clause adjunction ambiguities, agreement, gap filling and the relationship between grammars and parsers.
