Parsers and Grammars

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to submit a manuscript for a Special Issue of Languages titled “Parsers and Grammars”. We aim to animate reflection upon a topic of great significance to the community of researchers interested in language.

It is well known that at least in principle studying grammar is different from studying parsing. This is because, among other reasons, linguistic theory abstracts away from a great deal of detail that relates to low levels of analysis. Yet, an interesting thing happens when precisely by addressing those low level processes new questions arise that are of theoretical significance. This makes research on parsing crucial for any meaningful debate on the nature of language—if psychological adequacy is to be taken seriously. There are other benefits of studying mental linguistic representations online too and one of them is that such a move allows us to narrow down the scope of grammar. Indeed, if some of the processes that have been used to argue for various complex syntactic theories are better seen to originate in other cognitive domains, then linguists need not account for them. This automatically makes whatever they still need to account for a more realistic and feasible enterprise (Phillips 2013).

Here we focus on the relationship between grammars and processors by asking if sleeping colorless green ideas and horses raced past barnyards really talk to each other (Acuña-Fariña 2023). This opens a variety of possible angles, many of them intertwined. Among these are the following:

-The proposal of two systems vs one (Momma & Phillips 2018)

-Illusions of grammaticality and of ungrammaticality (Phillips et al. 2011)

-The role of timing in the application of grammatical constraints and illusions. How long do specific illusions last and why (Parker & Phillips 2016)?

-Comprehension vs production

-Individual differences in parsing

-Heuristics as seen by currently fashionable models of good-enough processing and related goal-directed proposals, such as surprisal theory, predictive coding models, and noisy channel models

-The idea that perceptual strategies differ from language to language depending on the statistical regularities that dominate in each language (Vasishth et al. 2010; Futrell et al. 2020)

-Prediction after Hale (2001) and Levy (2008)

-The processing of islands

-The idea that the more material intervenes in a long-distance relationship, the less room for surprisal there is at the final moment of resolution or co-indexation. Or is it precisely the other way around?

-Are some constructions (say, negative polarity) more easily turned into templates than others (say, islands) (Acuña-Fariña 2022)?

Contributions may range from descriptive to formal and experimental approaches. We request that, prior to submitting a full manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and abstract of approximately 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to both the Guest Editor, Carlos Acuña-Fariña (carlos.acuna.farina), or to the Languages Editorial Office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:
Abstract submission deadline: 20 November 2023
Notification of abstract acceptance: 20 December 2023
Full submission deadline: 1 July 2024

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

References

Acuña-Fariña, C.  2022. Parsers and grammars: A tutorial overview from the linguistics building. Brain Sciences 12 (12): 1659. 

Acuña-Fariña, C. 2023. Syntactic processing. An overview. Routledge: Oxfordshire.

Futrell, R., Gibson, E. & Levy, R. P. 2020. Lossy-context surprisal: an information-theoretic model of memory effects in sentence processing. Cognitive Science 44: e12814.

Hale, J. T. 2011. What a rational parser would do. Cognitive Science 35 (3): 399–443.

Levy, R. 2008. Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106: 1126–1177.

Momma, S. & Phillips, C. 2018. The relationship between parsing and generation. Annual Review of Linguistics 4: 233–254.

Parker, D., and Phillips, C. 2016. Negative polarity illusions and the format of hierarchical encodings in memory. Cognition 157: 321–339.

Phillips, C., Wagers, M. W., & Lau, E. F. 2011. Grammatical illusions and selective fallibility in real-time language comprehension. In Experiments at the interfaces, J. Runner (ed.). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. pp. 147–180. 

Phillips, C. 2013. Parser-grammar relations: We don’t understand everything twice. In Language down the garden path: the cognitive basis for linguistic structure, Sanz, M.; Laka, I. &  Tanenhaus, M. (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 294–315. 

Vasishth, S., Suckow, K., Lewis, R. L., & Kern, S. 2010. Short-term forgetting in sentence comprehension: Crosslinguistic evidence from verb-final structures. Language and Cognitive Processes 25(4): 533–567.

Prof. Dr. Carlos Acuña-Fariña
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• parsing
• grammar
• psycholinguistics
• illusions
• heuristics