It is suggested that invited inference is a case of valid inference by saying that English "if...then" sentences are logically ambigous. The ambiguity of "if...then" sentences may be related syntactically or semantically to "or.""Or,""if...then," and "and" all invite inferences. (SC)

Two psycholinguistic processes are examined in a phoneme monitoring experiment and a sentence completion experiment. Tests were conducted with matched materials on subjects drawn from one population. With ambiguous lexical items all meanings are retrieved, but following a decision stage only one is transferred to memory. (SC)

In decoding a text, one chooses the interpretation involving maximal redundancy, selecting meanings that are most likely and least surprising in the relevant context. Clues for this selection of meanings are gathered from phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic levels. In disambiguating third-person-pronoun references…

Maintaining that two kinds of ambiguity--ambiguous prepositional phrases and ambiguous modification of conjoined elements--account for a large number of ambiguous sentences in technical writing, this paper presents an algebraic analysis of each kind of ambiguity. It then suggests a number of ways in which each ambiguity may be unclear. By using…

This research deals with how extraction rules are constrained in cases where their unconstrained application would give rise to semantic ambiguity. Of particular concern is the application of extraction rules to noun phrases (NP's) where word order is the only indication of the different syntactic functions of two adjacent NP's. Samples from…

Revised version of a paper presented at the December 27, 1972 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Atlanta, Georgia; research supported by the National Science Foundation. (DD)

A class of sentences is discussed in which pronominal forms and their antecedents do not have semantic identity. "One" pronominalization, in particular, is discussed. (SC)

Examines, through two studies, how prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. The first study dealt with people's judgments of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing contours. (27 references)…

Focuses on the consequences that the structural configuration of lexical knowledge has for the timecourse of parsing. Discusses reduced relative clauses and proposes a new lexical-structural analysis for manner of motion verbs. The article examines consequences for frequency-based models and all models whose difficulty derives from the ambiguity…

Revised and expanded version of a paper read to the Fifteenth Annual Conference on Linguistics, New York City, March 14, 1970. (VM)

This monograph is based on a doctoral thesis submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota in August 1969. (MG)

When a grammar is expressed in augmented transition network (ATN) form, the problem of detecting syntactic ambuguity reduces to finding all possible paths through the ATNs. Each successfully terminating path through the ATN generates an acceptable parsing of the input string. Two ATN forms, minimal-node and pseudo-tree, are described along with…

The author considers the rule of negative transportation in English and discusses his ideas about such a rule in contrast to the theories set forth by Robin Lakoff. The rule of negative transportation allows the shifting of a negative, under certain conditions, from a lower clause into a higher one. The discussion centers around the occurrence of…