Parsing theory and phrase-order variation in German V2 clauses

This paper examines the syntactic processing of structural ambiguities in German verbsecond (V2) clauses. It is argued that the proposal of Grimshaw (1991, 1993) that CP and IP are verbal extended projections allows an incremental parse of these ambiguities which is consistent with the principles of simplicity(no vacuous structure building) and structural determinism(computed dominance and precedence relations cannot be altered by parser-internal operations) proposed in Gorrell (1995). It is argued that the ambiguities discussed here provide evidence against the hypothesis that the parser's initial attachment decisions follow from a maximal-licensing principle rather than a preference for minimal structure (Pritchett, 1992). Further, it is argued that, contra Fodor and Inoue (1994), theories of syntactic processing must not only incorporate some mechanism for resolving conflicts between new input and computed structure, but also distinguish the comparative costs of different reanalysis types.This is a condensed version of Gorrell (1996a). In this paper I discuss only a few of the relevant structures in German. The longer paper examines the processing ofwh-strucrures and verb-final clauses in German, omitted here. For a more detailed discussion of the properties of the parsing model outlined here, see Gorrell (1995).Many thanks are due to Gisbert Fanselow, Peter Staudacher, Matthias Schlesewsky, and Craig Thiersch for helpful comments and criticisms. This paper was written while I was a member of the University of Potsdam Linguistics Department and I want to thank Ria De Bleser, Jürgen Weissenborn, and the students in my seminars on parsing theory for helping to make Potsdam a good place to work. Jutta Kasprzik deserves special thanks for favors too numerous to list. I also want to thank audiences at the University of Jena and the workshop on sentence processing at the Einstein Forum, Potsdam.