Right attachment and preference semantics

Abstract

The paper claims that the right attachment rules for phrases originally suggested by Frazier and Fodor are wrong, and that none of the subsequent patchings of the rules by syntactic methods have improved the situation. For each rule there are perfectly straightforward and indefinitely large classes of simple counter-examples. We then examine suggestions by Ford et M., Schubert and Hirst which are quasi-semantic in nature and which we consider ingenious but unsatisfactory. We point towards a straightforward solution within the framework of preference semantics, set out in detail elsewhere, and argue that the principal issue is not the type and nature of information required to get appropriate phrase attachments, but the issue of where to store the information and with what processes to apply it.