Introduction: Formal vs. processing explanations of linguistic phenomena

Abstract

We summarise some of the factors affecting decisions about the status of syntactic phenomena: pragmatics, linguistic processing capacity, extra-linguistic computation, and methodology. We conclude that although there are clear-cut cases for which the decision to assign a phenomenon to processing or to irreducible syntactic principles is simple, there are many instances in which the decision is contentious.

Keywords:

• Processing explanations
• Irreducibility
• Methodology in linguistics

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the comments on this introduction of two anonymous reviewers. The work on this chapter was partially supported by a University of York Pump Priming grant to the authors.

Notes

¹An anonymous reviewer pointed out that the repetition of “finally” in (3b) is awkward. We include it as it is present in Reinhart's original example, but it's worth pointing out that either (or both) occurrences of “finally” can be dropped from the sentence without changing the availability of a co-referential reading.