For almost 80 years, Chinese linguists have been fascinated by sentences like "Pijiu ba, he dianr!" ("Beer, I'll have some!"), which look superficially like a jumbled-up version of "normal-order sentences." Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain their structure and meaning, but no consensus has been reached as to how their true essence…

Much experimental work in psycholinguistics suggests that fully specified syntactic and semantic interpretations are obtained incrementally. The finding that interpretation takes place incrementally is very robust and underlies our own view of sentence processing as well; however, most of this work tends to test very simple interpretive judgments…