Construal

Construal presents a new theory of sentence
processing, one that allows a limited type of underspecification in the syntactic
analysis of sentences. It extends what has arguably been the dominant theory of
parsing (the garden-path theory developed by Lyn Frazier and colleagues) through the
1980s into new and previously unexplored domains, and greatly advances the potential
for insights into how meaning is both made and understood.

Frazier
and Clifton, both pioneers in parsing theory, present new psycholinguistic theory
and experimentation concerning how "nonprimary" phrases are analyzed in sentence
comprehension. They define a process of "construal" and show how it accounts for
cases in which the parser does not fully determine structure during the course of
ordinary comprehension.

The idea of construal arises in part
through the authors' critical review of the challenges to their established
framework for research on structural parsing. While they demonstrate that the
principles of parsing theory remain valid for a wide variety of languages and
grammatical constructions, they go beyond them to clearly identify those types of
constructions built by the process of construal. Frazier and Clifton show that
construal follows distinct principles, and they flesh out their hypothesis with
previously unexamined evidence and new empirical tests.