Successive cyclicity in the grammar and the parser

Abstract

Four experiments studied the comprehension of sentences with relations between empty positions and phrases displaced from these positions (“gaps” and 'fillers). Evidence from self-paced reading and end-of-sentence acceptability judgement tasks confirms previous research indicating that the parser prefers to assign an identified filler as the argument of a verb immediately, rather than waiting to check the input for a lexical item of the expected category. We propose that the parser follows an “active filler strategy” which ranks the option of a gap above other options in the domain of an identified filler. The preference for gap over lexical item was evidenced even when a clause boundary separated filler and gap, but the need in this case to carry a filler across a clause boundary created substantial processing difficulty. We propose that, in processing a “long” movement (across more than one clause), the parser must assign the filler to a special “non-argument” position in a successive cylic fashion, consistent with the successive cyclic analysis of long-distance dependencies offered by some grammars.