ABSTRACT
A considerable body of modern science is concerned with the origins of structures and phenomena. Cosmologists engage in intense debate on the origins of the universe, biochemists speculate about the origins of life, and paleontologists and physical anthropologists discuss the origins of hominids and Homo sapiens. Similar debates have played a central part in discussions of numerous phenomena in the study of language (e.g., Bickerton, 1990). Researchers have investigated change, evolution, and innovation in language and have asked whether particular properties or features are innate—perhaps determined by the structure of the human mind—or whether they are acquired as a consequence of the language user’s individual experiences. Although it is probably uncontentious that certain aspects of language are acquired (e.g., vocabulary, accents, and specific grammars or dialects), there is a strongly held view among linguists, in particular, that certain structural principles of language are universal and innate (Atkinson, 1992; Chomsky, 1986; Cook, 1988; Pinker, 1994; Radford, 1990). If this is true, it raises the possibility that some of the procedures that people use to process language may also be universal and innate. This question may be addressed at many different levels of language processing, but because of the prominent role of syntax in modern linguistic debate, one of the central battlegrounds in the nature/nurture war zone has been in the field of syntactic analysis or parsing. Inevitably, much of the debate revolves around whether a fixed set of parsing strategies is used to process the different languages of the world. The present chapter addresses this question, drawing heavily on empirical studies of sentence processing in Spanish and other Romance languages.
