ABSTRACT
I argue that the claim of autonomous syntactic processing is irrefutable if non-determinism is permitted, e.g., by the use of arbitrary choice and backtracking. The vast majority of existing models of syntactic analysis, therefore, cannot support such a claim if it is to be considered an empirical claim. More recent deterministic theories of syntactic analysis—in particular, Marcus (1980) and Marcus et al. (1983)—seem at first glance more promising. However, by their repeated failure to address many of the problems which make language analysis so difficult in the first place—such as lexical ambiguity and genuine structural ambiguity—these theories too fail to assert or support an empirically significant claim of autonomous syntactic processing. Moreover, the very problems in language analysis that these theories ignore provide strong evidence that such claims are in fact false.
