Parsing theory and phrase-order variation in German V2 clauses

This paper examines the syntactic processing of structural ambiguities in Germany verb-second (V2) clauses. It is argued that the proposal of Grimshaw (1991, 1993) that CP and IP are verbal "extended projections" allows an incremental parse of these ambiguities which is consistent with the principles of simplicity (no vacuous structure building) and structural determinism (computed dominance and precedence relations cannot be altered by parser-internal operations) proposed in Gorrell (1995). It is argued that the ambiguities discussed here provide evidence against the hypothesis that the parser's initial attachment decisions follow from a maximal-licensing principle rather than a preference for minimal structure (Pritchett, 1992). Further, it is argued that, contra Fodor and Inoue (1994), theories of syntactic processing must not only incorporate some mechanism for resolving conflicts between new input and computed structure, but also distinguish the comparative costs of different reanalysis types.