Right Attachment and Preference Semantics

The paper claims that the right attachment rules for phrases originally suggested by Frazier and Fodor are wrong, and that none of the subsequent patchings of the rules by syntactic methods have improved the situation. For each rule there are perfectly straightforward and indefinitely large classes of simple counterexamples. We then examine suggestions by Ford et M., Schubert and Hirst which are quasi-semantic in nature and which we consider ingenious but unsatisfactory. We point towards a straightforward solution within the framework of preference semantics, set out in detail elsewhere, and argue that the principal issue is not the type and nature of information required to get appropriate phrase attachments, but the issue of where to store the information and with what processes to apply it. SYNTACTIC APPROACHES Recent discussion of the issue of how and where to attach right-hand phrases (and more generally, clauses) in sentence analysis was started by the claims of Frasier and Fodor (1979). They offered two rules : (i) Right Association which is that phrases on the right should be attached as low as possible on a syntax tree, thus JOHN BOUGHT THE BOOK THAT I HAD BEEN TRYING TO OBT t~/OR SUSAN) which attaches to OBTAIN not to BOUGHT. But this rule fails for JOHN BOUGHT THE BOOK (FOR SUSAN) which requires attachment to BOUGHT not BOOK. A second principle was then added : (ii) Minimal Attachment which is that a phrase must be attached higher in a tree if doing that minimizes the number of nodes in the tree (and this rule is to take precedence over (i)).