Sentence disambiguation in the phonology-syntax-semantic interface

However, the authors noticed a variation between interpretations with local and nonlocal apposition in the comprehension of sentences without prosodic elongation. That is, according to the authors, the absence of prosodic marking would not favor one or the other interpretation, whereas elongated prosodic marking would favor a non-local interpretation. In our work, we argue that the disambiguation of this type of sentence depends basically on the resolution of a conflict between three different grammatical principles that are acting together in the disambiguation of sentences with this structure: a prosodic principle, a syntactic-computational principle and a semantic-pragmatic principle.

In order to prove our point, we developed an off-line sentence comprehension test and applied it to 270 informants. Our results point to an interaction between these three principles in the resolution of the ambiguity of these sentences.