Reduced Relatives: Lexical Constraint-based Analysis

1 Introduction One of the central controversies in sentence processing concerns the role of structural factors. The touchstone for the two main competing schools of thought, structure-based and constraint-based, are garden-path sentences, such as The horse raced past the barn fell, discussed in sentence processing literature since at least Bever (1970), and in general the resolution of ambiguities. On the structural approach, the burden of explanation falls on syntax. Although it is acknowledged that other factors are important in processing, such as lexical frequencies, thematic fit, context, world knowledge, etc., syntactic constraints override all the other factors in cases of conflict and syntactic constraints alone can cause failure to interpret a sentence (cf. Stevenson and Merlo, 1997:392, for example). One recent implementation of this view within Government and Binding Theory can be found in Stevenson and Merlo (1997) who propose that internal structural differences between unaccusative and unergative verbs at the lexical level have crucial consequences for the processing difficulty of sentences with reduced relative clauses.