Syntactic Privilege

This pape r i s a d d r e s s e d t o the v iew o f Schank and B i r n baum (1981) t h a t s y n t a x has no " p r i v i l e g e d ' p o s i t i o n i n p a r s i n g . E v i d e n t l y what i s meant i s ( a ) t h a t s y n t a c t i c p a r s i n g has no logical or temporal priority over semantic processing, and (b)that syntax has been as@igned attention far out of proportion to its interest or distinctiveness. (The latter is not asserted outright, but seems implicit in the overall tone of the discussion.) In the view of the authors (henceforth "SB'), syntactic considerations come into play in sentence u~derstandi~E only where it is needed to resolve indeterminacies. It is this view that I wish to subject to scrutiny.