The Psychological Reality of Syntactic Principles

Abstract

In this chapter, I survey a variety of grammars that have played a role in psycholinguistics, tracing the coevolution of theories in formal syntax and the computational parsing models that they inspired. In Chomsky’s “Standard Theory” the output of context-free rules is fed into the transformational component of a grammar. Many incorrectly interpreted early psycholinguistic experiments as shedding doubt on the psychological reality of transformational operations. These arguments, based on the Derivational Theory of Complexity, ultimately fail. But transformational parsers were rejected anyway, on computational grounds. Augmented Transition Networks (ATNs) rose to prominence, offering a promising framework for describing the surface syntax of natural language, as well as a natural implementation of the grammar as a parsing model. ATN parsers thus serve as a clear example of how grammatical rules can be viewed as procedural dispositions. A strong criticism of the ATN architecture, due to Lyn Frazier and Janet Fodor, relied heavily on the fact that ATNs do not explicitly represent the rules of a grammar in a separate data structure. Frazier and Fodor’s argument faces difficulties, but it vividly illustrates the kind of explanatory payoff that a model might derive from explicitly representing a grammar. Finally, I turn to principle-based parsers, which implement the principles of the Government and Binding (GB) theory as either generators or filters of syntactic analyses, yielding compact, efficient, wide-coverage systems. More recently, computational linguists have built parsers that use the syntactic principles of the Minimalist program. Indeed, Amy Weinberg has argued that parsing is “the incremental satisfaction of grammatical constraints” imposed by Minimalist grammars. If successful, her proposal would constitute the strongest argument for the psychological reality of Minimalist principles.