Left-corner parsing of minimalist grammars

Much recent research in experimental psycholinguistics revolves around the resolution of long-distance dependencies, and the manner in which the human sentence processor “retrieves’” elements from earlier in a sentence that must be related in some way to the material currently being processed. At present there is no obvious way for the issues raised by this research to be framed in terms of an MG parser. Stabler’s 2013 top-down MG parser does not involve any corresponding notion of “retrieval’”: it requires that a phrase’s position in the derivation tree be completely identified before the phrase can be scanned, which means that a filler cannot be scanned without committing to a particular location for its corresponding gap. This chapter attempts to develop a parsing algorithm that is inspired by Stabler, but which allows a sentence-initial filler to be scanned immediately while delaying the choice of corresponding gap position.

Parsing with Minimalist Grammars and prosodic trees

Advances in the syntactic parsing of written language have proceeded apace in the last few decades, but much less progress has been made in the syntactic parsing of spoken language. Here, we address one question important for such progress: how can we bring prosody in to inform syntactic parsing of spoken language? We identify and take on two key challenges: (i) explicitly defining aspects of the syntax–prosody interface, including prosodic trees, and (ii) modeling distinct contributions of syntax to conditioning prosodic events, including aspects other than relations between syntactic and prosodic domain edges, such as prosodic reflexes of spell-out. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept implementation of simultaneous (post-)syntactic and prosodic parsing of a Samoan utterance, with syntactic parsing informed by prosody, and prosodic parsing informed by syntax.