Introduction

INTRODUCTION It has been argued by some (Schank, 1975; Small & Reiger, 1982) that it is possible to reduce the necessity for structural analysis and go directly from individual word meanings to the meaning of the sentence. However, even in these case-based approaches, where the constituents are assigned their respective case roles (e.g. agent, action, patient), word order and function words are important sources of information. Other evidence from neuropsychology (Shallice, 1988), suggests that there are specialised modules in the brain that deal specifically with syntactic aspects of sentence processing. For example, there are patients with lesions that affect their ability to use function words. These same patients show no comprehension deficit. Of course, it depends on one’s perspective on natural language processing, whether or not such evidence is considered admissable.