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Processing Adjunct Control: Evidence On The Use Of Structural Information And Prediction In Reference Resolution, Jeffrey Jack Green, Michael Mccourt, Ellen Lau, Alexander Williams

Faculty Publications

The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked to Minnie before ___ eating. Using visualworld eyetracking, we compare the timecourse of interpreting this null subject and overt …