Towards a model of incremental composition

Abstract

This paper reviews some recent psycholinguistic results on semantic processing and explores their consequences for a cognitively plausible model of incremental composition. We argue that semantic composition is neither strictly incremental (in the sense that every incoming word is composed immediately) nor global (in the sense that composition only proceeds when the entire syntactic structure is available). We conjecture that incremental composition is type driven: elements in the same type domain (e.g. temporal <i>) are composed immediately; elements that concern different type domains (e.g. temporal <i> vs. event <v>) cause delayed processing.