Centro de Linguística da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
Department of Psychology and CRAMC, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
Cognition. 2021 Jun;211:104624. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104624. Epub 2021 Feb 26.
The relationship between syntactic ambiguity and locality has been a reliable cornerstone in theories of language comprehension with one exception: non-local preferences in object-modifying relative clauses preceded by two potential hosts (DP1 of DP2 RC). We test the offline and online effects of the availability of an alternative structure, the pseudo-relative, on the parsing of relative clauses. It has been claimed that pseudo-relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their simplicity at the structural, interpretive and pragmatic levels, and act as a confound in the attachment literature (Grillo, 2012; Grillo & Costa, 2014). Our results show that attachment preferences are modulated by the availability of pseudo-relatives in offline and online tests. However, when this factor is controlled, parsing of relative clauses in Spanish is initially ruled by principles of locality, which can eventually be overridden by other factors.
句法歧义与局部性之间的关系一直是语言理解理论的可靠基石，但有一个例外：在由两个潜在主语（DP2 的 DP1）先行的修饰宾语的关系从句中存在非局部偏好。我们测试了替代结构的可及性，即假性关系从句，对关系从句解析的离线和在线影响。有人声称，假性关系从句由于其在结构、解释和语用层面上的简单性，以及在附着文献中作为混淆因素（Grillo，2012；Grillo & Costa，2014）而优先于关系从句。我们的结果表明，在离线和在线测试中，假性关系从句的可及性调节了附着偏好。然而，当控制了这一因素时，西班牙语中关系从句的解析最初受到局部性原则的支配，这些原则最终可能会被其他因素所超越。
