To be published in: Literary and Linguistic Computing. 1996.
Online version published by permission of Oxford University Press.
The title of this book is perhaps misleading. As a computational linguist I had expected the book to be about computational approaches to natural language parsing. But this book deals with cognitive parsing, i.e. modelling the parsing processes within the human brain. The syntax background is provided by Government Binding (GB) Theory.
Not being an expert in that area I decided to review the book from the perspective of an interested researcher from a neighboring field, trying to learn about GB and its role in human language processing and in cognitive linguistics.
Paul Gorrell outlines a model of human sentence processing from a GB perspective. In this model he distinguishes between primary and secondary operations. Primary operations include building up a phrase structure tree including dominance and precedence relations. These operations are deterministic, i.e. they are not redone because of ambiguities not even in the case of garden path phenomena. In contrast, secondary operations are not deterministic. These include government, c-command, theta assignment, case assignment, and binding. These operations serve to interpret the structure being established by the primary operations. When encountering material that requires reanalysis of interpretation the secondary operations are redone.
Gorrell takes great care to argue that this model is in accordance with empirical findings in cognitive linguistics experiments such as reaction time tests, eye movement tests, shadowing tests etc. Some of these tests he has performed himself, but mostly he tries to accommodate his proposal within the findings of many other researchers in the field.
The book is structured into 6 chapters. Chapter 1 `Introduction' sets the goals:
(p.1) It is a central thesis of this book that recent work within Government Binding (GB) theory (Chomsky 1981, and subsequent work) raises questions about the nature of syntactic knowledge that have long concerned researchers into syntactic processing (parsing).
(p.4) The aim of this book is to give as much attention to the form of the grammar as to the form of the parser.
Chapter 2 gives an introduction to GB theory, distinguishing between derivational (with levels: d-structure, s-structure, logical form) and representational (monostratal) GB. Gorrell assumes a monostratal version for his model. Chapter 3 is devoted to `Analyses of previous work'. It is a detailed survey of the research in human sentence parsing. It looks at the field from many different perspectives providing a host of examples showing that processing difficulties are not restricted to the garden path in
Let me cite three more examples to reflect the flavor of the discussion:
Elaborating on chapter 3, chapter 4 is the heart of the book. Here, the author outlines his model, contrasting it to competing approaches and showing briefly how it applies to languages other than English, namely head-final languages like Japanese and German. Chapter 5 looks at how semantic and pragmatic factors influence structure building in the human brain. The chapter leaves me with the impression that this area is still little explored and that it is much harder to design good experiments. Nevertheless, I agree with Gorrell that issues such as absolute and relative frequency of word occurrence, as well as priming by context are keys to an improved understanding of the ease and speed of human sentence processing. Chapter 6 concludes the book with a short summary.
The book is a scientific work in the best tradition. It lays the groundwork, reports on experiments, presents a model incorporating the experimental results and defends the model against competing proposals. It comes with an extensive reference list. As such the book addresses mostly researchers in a relatively narrow scientific domain, namely people working in cognitive linguistics. I found it demanding to read even with a background in a neighboring discipline. The book is certainly not an introduction to the field nor can it be used as a textbook.
One reason for the efforts required from a thoughtful reader is the pervasive use of acronyms. Here are just two examples:
(p.51) The motivation for the PPP processing input in accord with the strategies LC and MA is that ...
(p.150) Before contrasting MT and IT and motivating a theory of SI parsing, it is necessary ...
Certainly, all but the most obvious acronyms are introduced in the book at one point or another. But they add up to such a number that they result in a cognitive burden. This is regrettable, especially since an acronym glossary is missing.
Other than this, the book has been crafted with great care. Layout and tree structure graphs are excellent and there are very few misspellings. One would wish that more publications were on such a level of formal quality.