PSYC 305L Lecture Notes - Lecture 37: Parsing, Pragmatics
1. Sentence Parsing
a. A sentence phrase structure, conveys crucial information about who did what to whom
a.i. Parse
a.i.1. To figure out each word's syntactic role
a.i.1.a. Figure out each word’s syntactic role
a.i.1.a.i. Wait until the sentences end and only then go to work on
figuring out the structure
a.i.1.a.i.1. Comprehension might be slowed a little, but
you’d avoid errors
a.i.1.a.i.1.a. Your interpretation could
be guided by full information about the
sentence’s content
a.i.2. Parse is different in a sense where they try to figure out the role of each
word the moment it arrives
b. Garden Paths
b.i. Garden-path sentences
b.i.1. A sentence that initially leads the reader to one understanding of how
the sentence's words are related but then requires a change in this
understanding to comprehend the sentence.
b.i.2. Examples are "The old man ships" and "The horse raced past the barn
fell."
b.i.3. Highlight the risk attached to the strategy of interpreting a sentence as it
arrives
b.i.4. The information you need in order to understand these sentences
arrives only late in the sequence
c. Syntax as a Guide to Parsing
c.i. You can slow down when you do encounter a passive sentence versus an
active on for interpreting
c.ii. parsing is also influenced by the function words that appear in a sentence and by
the various morphemes that signal syntactic role
d. Background Knowledge as a Guide to Parsing
d.i. Parsing is also guided by background knowledge, and in general, people try to
parse sentences in a way that makes sense to them
e. The Extralinguistic Context
e.i. Extralinguistic context
e.i.1. The social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered;
usually, cues within this setting guide the interpretation of the utterance.
e.i.2. investigators have examined the effects of plausibility on
readers’ interpretations of the words they’re seeing
f. The Use of Language: What is Left Unsaid
f.i. Prosody
f.i.1. The pattern of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech
production.
f.i.2. Prosody can be used (among other functions) to emphasize elements of
a spoken sentence, to highlight the sentence's intended structure, or to signal the
difference between a question and an assertion.
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