linguistic

A Review of the Linguistic Research on Definite Descriptions

Renata Vieira

1.Introduction

We present in this paper a review on the linguistic literature on the types of uses of definite descriptions (noun phrases with the definite article the). Definite descriptions have been studied extensively by linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and computational linguists. The theories discussed in this paper help us to understand the problem of interpreting definite descriptions. We look at research studying the various ways in whi

Linguistic complexity:locality of syntactic dependencies

Edward Gibson*

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Cambridge,MA 02139,USA

Received 18September 1997;accepted 24April 1998

Abstract

This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources.This theory –the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT)–has two components:an integration cost component and a compo-nent for the memory cost associated with k