Parsing Arguments and Adjuncts

Parsers today are required to produce a semantically interpretable output for any text: in order to achieve such a goal, Grammatical Relations need to be assigned to words usually in some kind of hierarchical representation, before some Logical Form can be built. We also assume that in order for a parser to achieve psychological reality it should satisfy three different types of requirements: psycholinguistic plausibility, computational efficiency in implementation, coverage of grammatical principles and constraints. Principles underlying the parser architecture should not conform exclusively to one or the other area, disregarding issues which might explain the behaviour of the human processor. In accordance with this criterion, we assume that the implementation should closely mimick phenomena such as Garden Path effects, or an increase in computational time in presence of semantically vs syntactically biased ambiguous structures. We also assume that a failure should ensue from strong Garden Path effects and that this should be justified at a psycholinguistic interpretation level.