The role of lexical heads in parsing: Evidence from German

Theories of sentence processing can be classified by the role that lexical heads play in first-pass parsing. In some theories, syntactic structure cannot even be built before it is licensed by a head (Abney, 1989; Prichett, 1992), whereas in other models, at the opposite extreme, only major category information in lexical items is used during the rule-based initial structure building process (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; Mitchell, 1987). In this paper, we will introduce a fully incremental model that accounts for attachment preferences by the linear order of lexical heads in the surface structure and their thematic properties. The principle of ''parameterised head attachment'' and a serial variant, the SOUL mechanism, will be discussed on the basis of three on-line experiments on NP- and PP-attachment in German verb-second and verb-final sentences.