A computer grammar is described which includes most of the English relative-clause constructions. It is written in the form of a left-to-right phrase-structure grammar with discontinuous constituents and subscripts, which carry such syntactic restrictions as number and verb government category. The motivation for the hierarchy of syntactic choices and for the use of discontinuous constituents i...

Abstract This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The gr...

Over the past 25 years of sentence processing research, hardly any other phenomenon has generated more experimental evidence and theoretical explanations than the apparent violations of Late Closure (Frazier and Fodor 1978) observed with the relative clause attachment ambiguity. Under the Late Closure principle, local attachments are preferred over non-local ones. Accordingly, the structural am...