Parsers and Grammars: A Tutorial Overview from the Linguistics Building

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the relationship between grammars and processing systems in light of the various forms of experimental research (especially of an electrophysiological nature) that has been conducted in the last fifteen years or so. First, the notion of ‘processing strategy’ or ‘heuristics processing’ is considered followed by a discussion of structures of great morphosyntactic complexity that parsing systems seem to tackle by simply respecting complex grammatical laws, instead of by resorting to shortcuts. Then, grammatical illusions and what these can teach us about the processing of grammar are considered. It is argued that illusions allow us to discern a few explanatory principles that may redefine the way we see parser–grammar relations. Among these is the idea that how long illusions last in the online-to-offline transition depends in part on their ‘templatability’, that is, the ease with which they become gestaltic templates. Another key idea is that some apparent illusions are in fact nothing more than grammar contemplated at work as in slow motion.