RT Generic
T1 Relative adjunction ambiguities in English vs Spanish
A1 Loira Rodríguez, María Celia
K1 Ambigüidade na linguaxe
K1 Relativas
K1 Inglés
K1 Español
AB This work deals with the syntactic attachment preferences of ambiguous relative clauses with double nominal antecedent both in English and Spanish. Ambiguities tend to be resolved differently in both languages and in order to explain these differences I will introduce various theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution or parsing strategies, such as late closure, minimal attachment and tuning. For example, in the clause ‘Someone shot the maid of the actress who was on the balcony’ (Alguien disparó a la criada de la actriz que estaba en el balcón) we find an ambiguity because the relative clause ‘who was on the balcony’ can modify ‘the maid’ or ‘the actress’ (that is, the grammar of RC attachment does not specify who is actually in the balcony in either Spanish or English). English speakers prefer to attach the relative clause to most recent noun of the complex phrase (actress), but Spanish speakers tend to take the first noun (the head of overall complex NP) as the host to the relative clause (maid). In order to study these inclinations of parsers when producing new sentences I will report two sentence completion experiments, one in Spanish and another in English. I seek to contribute to a deeper knowledge of the factors that play a part in the resolution of this ambiguity in particular, as well as to shed light on the general dynamics of modifier attachment in language
YR 2018
FD 2018-11-05
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/23760
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/23760
LA eng
NO Traballo Fin de Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesas. Curso 2018-2019
DS Minerva
RD 27 abr 2026