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Parsing Coordinates and Ellipsis: Copy α
Author(s) -
Frazier Lyn,
Clifton, Jr. Charles
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
syntax
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.587
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9612
pISSN - 1368-0005
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9612.00034
Subject(s) - copying , parsing , computer science , ellipsis (linguistics) , antecedent (behavioral psychology) , sentence , mechanism (biology) , inference , sentence processing , artificial intelligence , natural language processing , psychology , developmental psychology , philosophy , epistemology , political science , law
In this paper we argue that the human parsing mechanism has available two distinct methods of building syntactic structure. One mechanism, which has been studied extensively, involves building structure in response to the input in a step‐by‐step, inference‐by‐inference manner. Building more structure by this means involves more processing cost than building less structure. The second mechanism, proposed here, involves essentially cost‐free copying of the structure of an antecedent clause. Building more structure by this means (copying) does not necessarily impose a greater cost than building (copying) less structure. The results of several sentence processing studies are presented in support of the proposal.