Accounting for Crosslinguistic Variation:
A Constraint-Based Perspective
Robert Thornton, Mariela Gil, and Maryellen C. MacDonald
University of Southern California
Much of the research on sentence processing has focused on
discovering universal principles to explain parsing preferences.
Recent cross-linguistic work, however, suggests that processing is
sensitive to distributional information about individual languages.
Along these lines, we explore a constraint-based approach to
processing, in which cross-linguistic variation is explained by the
interaction of language specific grammatical constraints with more
general pragmatic principles. Specifically, we examine the role of
pragmatic information in constraining the modification of complex noun
phrases in English and Spanish. We first present data suggesting
that, for both languages, initial comprehension is constrained in the
same manner by pragmatic information. We then pursue an explanation
of cross-linguistic differences in terms of pragmatic constraints on
grammatical differences between the languages.
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