The assembly and disassembly of Determiner Phrases : minimality is needed, but not sufficient

Abstract

The internal processing of simple determiner phrases has received little attention in the processing literature so far. German determiners can occur with and without nominal complements. Therefore, a sequence of determiner and noun can be ambiguous: determiner and noun can either form a single phrase ([Det N]) or two phrases ([Det] [N]). Three self-paced-reading experiments reveal a preference for the single-phrase analysis. Locally ambiguous two-phrase sentences cause a garden-path effect. We argue that this preference is best explained in terms of semantic and prosodic minimality. The two-phrase analysis is semantically more complex because it involves two referents. It is prosodically more complex because it requires sentence stress on the determiner which is unstressed by default. Additional evidence for prosodic minimality comes from extraposed subject-modifying relative clauses. In two-phrase sentences, the relative clause was locally ambiguous between subject and object construal. By default, the relative clause is associated with the most recent NP, the object. Subject construal requires stress on the determiner. A focus adverbial preceding the subject facilitates subject construal by directing accentuation to the determiner.We present corpus data suggesting that lexical frequencies have an effect on the ambiguity under consideration, but that reference to minimality is still needed.