Old Story, New Results and Analyses

An eye-tracking and an electrophysiological experiment using a sentence/picture matching task were carried out in order to assess whether there would be significant differences between semantic restrictiveness properties of Prepositional Phrases (PPs) vis-à-vis those of Relative Clauses (RCs), attached as modifiers respectively to a local PP or to a non-local DP (e.g. the horse with the parrot with brown spots/the horse with the parrot that has brown spots). Two hypotheses were entertained, namely, (i) an operator construction such as an RC would be construed non-locally, that is, would attach high as a default, even if there is semantic bias attracting it to a low attachment; (ii) a light constituent (PP) has no prosodic autonomy and will be more available to local attachment and therefore would tend to attach locally as a default, even if there is semantic bias attracting it to a high attachment. Results in both experiments were in favor of the hypotheses and we speculate whether they could be more deeply grounded into the representational alternatives projected by linguistic theory itself.