Monotonic syntactic processing: A cross-linguistic study of attachment and reanalysis

This paper describes a new addition to the family of parsing models based on the principles of Description Theory (Marcus, Hindle, & Fleck, 1983). We demonstrate how the definition of two simple parsing operations, simple attachment and tree lowering, which are related to the grammatical composition operations of substitution and adjunction in the Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism, yields a parser which is more constrained than previous Description Theory based models (e.g. Gorrell, 1995a). Since the tree-lowering operation allows the parser to reanalyse in the case of ''unconscious'' garden paths, it can be used to investigate the consequences of adopting various search strategies for reanalysis, predicting preferences in cases where more than one possibility for reanalysis exists. Considering data from English and Japanese, we show that reanalysis preferences may differ between head-final and head-initial languages, and suggest some reasons why this might be so.