Deterministic parsing and linguistic explanation

Some arguments set forth in Berwick's & Weinberg's recent book The Grammatical Basis of Linguistic Performance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984) are elaborated. The volume explores questions of efficient parsing & learning & their relation to the representation of grammars, in an effort to help determine why natural langs are constructed as they are. The study assumes that parsing is deterministic, that grammatical representations are embedded directly into parsers, & that the human brain is finite. Some objections to these assumptions raised by J. Fodor (abstracted in this section) are addressed. It is shown that Fodor's objections to Berwick's & Weinberg's predictions about which constructions will obey subjacency actually support the idea of determinism. A case is made for the superiority of deterministic as opposed to nondeterministic parsers. It is shown that a deterministic parser is more efficient & provides for more compact representations than a nondeterministic approach, & that it can handle situations that other approaches cannot, eg, it can "recover" from so-called garden path situations. 36 References. B. Annesser Murray