TY - JOUR
T1 - Spanish is not different
T2 - On the universality of minimal structure and locality principles
AU - Aguilar López, Miriam
AU - Grillo, Nino
N1 - UIDB/03213/2020
UIDP/03213/2020
PD/BD/113975/2015
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - A sensible assumption in psycholinguistics is that universal principles of optimal computation guide structural decisions made during sentence processing. This idea was questioned by the apparent cross-linguistic variation in Relative Clause attachment: a wealth of experimental results from the nineties showed that speakers of Spanish, among other languages, more readily converged towards the least optimal structural resolution (i.e. non-local attachment) challenging the universality of parsing principles of locality. A more recent development in this literature demonstrated that previous results were confounded by the availability of an additional parse, the so-called Pseudo-Relative, in the ill-behaved languages (Grillo 2012; Grillo & Costa 2014). Grillo and colleagues further suggested that the parser more readily disambiguates in favour of the Pseudo-Relative reading, when possible, because of its structural and interpretive simplicity in comparison to Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment is a direct consequence of this independent preference. We present novel results in support of this account from two offline forced-choice attachment questionnaires in Spanish. The results show that Pseudo-Relative availability significantly affects attachment preferences and that cross-linguistic variation in Relative Clause attachment is likely to be epiphenomenal and largely attribu table to underlying grammatical differences.
AB - A sensible assumption in psycholinguistics is that universal principles of optimal computation guide structural decisions made during sentence processing. This idea was questioned by the apparent cross-linguistic variation in Relative Clause attachment: a wealth of experimental results from the nineties showed that speakers of Spanish, among other languages, more readily converged towards the least optimal structural resolution (i.e. non-local attachment) challenging the universality of parsing principles of locality. A more recent development in this literature demonstrated that previous results were confounded by the availability of an additional parse, the so-called Pseudo-Relative, in the ill-behaved languages (Grillo 2012; Grillo & Costa 2014). Grillo and colleagues further suggested that the parser more readily disambiguates in favour of the Pseudo-Relative reading, when possible, because of its structural and interpretive simplicity in comparison to Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment is a direct consequence of this independent preference. We present novel results in support of this account from two offline forced-choice attachment questionnaires in Spanish. The results show that Pseudo-Relative availability significantly affects attachment preferences and that cross-linguistic variation in Relative Clause attachment is likely to be epiphenomenal and largely attribu table to underlying grammatical differences.
KW - Universality of parsing principles
KW - Optimal Computation
KW - Locality
KW - Relative Clause Attachment
KW - Pseudo-Relatives
KW - Aspect
UR - https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85112000410&origin=resultslist&sort=plf-f&featureToggles=FEATURE_NEW_DOC_DETAILS_EXPORT:1
U2 - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1251
DO - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1251
M3 - Article
SN - 2397-1835
VL - 6
SP - 1
EP - 22
JO - Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics
JF - Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics
IS - 1
ER -