On being both head-initial and head-Final1

Abstract

This chapter reviews experimental evidence from German to address two questions. The first question concerns the time course of structure building by the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism (HSPM): When processing verb-final phrases, does the HSPM have to wait for the verb in order to postulate a VP, or can a VP be postulated even if its head has not been seen in the input? Evidence in favor of the second option comes from a syntactic ambiguity, which arises because certain words in German are lexically ambiguous between being a verb or an adjective. Experiments that have investigated this verb-adjective ambiguity have revealed a purely structural preference in favor of the verb reading, independent of any lexical frequency properties. I will argue that this is only compatible with an HSPM that can postulate a VP node even if the verb has not yet been encountered in the input. The second question asks for possible consequences of combining a head-final VP with a head-initial CP. As will be discussed for the case of German, this kind of mixed headedness is potentially harmful for the HSPM. Experimental evidence for this claim comes from sentences with center-embedded infinitival clauses. I argue that the grammar helps by providing structures that minimize the existing parsing problems.