First Published in 2002. This volume is part of the 'Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics' series. This book investigates the processing of ellipsis sentences, focusing on the following questions: (i) are ellipsis sentences processed using special routines employed only for ellipsis or are they processed using the same principles needed for unelided sentences? (ii) does parallelism influence sentence processing? if so, what kinds of similarities matter?

Top researchers in prosody and psycholinguistics present their research and their views on the role of prosody in processing speech and also its role in reading. The volume characterizes the state of the art in an important area of psycholinguistics. How are general constraints on prosody (‘timing’) and intonation (‘melody’) used to constrain the parsing and interpretation of spoken language? How are they used to assign a default prosody/intonation in silent reading, and more generally what is the role of phonology in reading? Prosody and intonation interact with phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and thus are at the very core of language processes.

First Published in 2002. This volume is part of the 'Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics' series. This book investigates the processing of ellipsis sentences, focusing on the following questions: (i) are ellipsis sentences processed using special routines employed only for ellipsis or are they processed using the same principles needed for unelided sentences? (ii) does parallelism influence sentence processing? if so, what kinds of similarities matter?

What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with language impairments process sentences in the same way as healthy monolingual adults? These are just some of the many questions that sentence processing researchers have tried to answer by conducting ever more sophisticated experiments, making this one of the most productive and exciting areas in experimental language research in recent years. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this important field. It contains 10 chapters written by world-leading experts, which discuss influential theories of sentence processing and important experimental evidence, with a focus on recent developments in the area. The chapters also analyse research that has investigated how people process the structure and meaning of sentences, and how sentences are understood within their context. This comprehensive and authoritative work will appeal to students and researchers in the field of sentence processing, as well anyone with an interest in psychology and linguistics.

What is the role of prosody in the generation of sentence structure? A standard notion holds that prosody results from mapping a hierarchical syntactic structure onto a linear sequence of words. A radically different view conceives of certain intonational features as integral components of the syntactic structure. Yet another conception maintains that prosody and syntax are parallel systems that mutually constrain each other to yield surface sentential form. The different viewpoints reflect the various functions prosody may have: On the one hand, prosody is a signal to syntax, marking e.g. constituent boundaries. On the other hand, prosodic or intonational features convey meaning; the concept “intonational morpheme” (as e.g. an exponent of information structural notions like topic or focus) puts prosody and intonation squarely into the syntactic representation. The proposals collected in this book tackle the intricate relationship of syntax and prosody in the encoding of sentences. The contributions build their cases on the basis of solid empirical evidence, adducing data from experiments or from the careful analysis of natural speech. The volume thus represents a state of the art survey of research on the syntax-phonology interface.

This handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis, a phenomena whereby expressions in natural language appear to be incomplete but are still understood. It explores fundamental questions about the workings of grammar and provides detailed case studies of inter- and intralinguistic variation.