On the Strength of the Local Attachment Preference

This paper investigates the strength of the local attachment preference in syntactic ambiguity resolution, based on a study of a novel ambiguity for which the predictions of local attachment contrast with the predictions of a wide range of other ambiguity resolution principles. In sentences of the form “Because Rose praised the recipe I made...” we show that the ambiguous clause “I made“ is preferentially attached as a relative clause under some circumstances, as predicted by local attachment, and preferentially attached as a matrix clause under other circumstances. Implications for accounts of locality in parsing are discussed. 1. The Locality Puzzle This paper is a progress report on our work which investigates the strength and the generality of the Local Attachment Preference.1 We use this term to refer in a theory-neutral way to whatever underlies the interpretive preference that speakers of English share when presented with a sentence like (1a). The first reading that becomes available is one in which the locative adverbial PP in the garden associates with the lower clause, such that it is the frog’s singing that is happening in the garden, and not the announcement that Alice made about the frog. In other words, the adverbial is preferentially attached to local material in the tree rather than to non-local material. The Local Attachment Preference is a pervasive phenomenon in parsing, and some more well known cases of Local Attachment from Kimball 1973 are shown in (1c-e).2 (1) a. Alice said the frog was singing in the garden. b.