TRACKING THE PREFERENCE FOR BOUND-VARIABLE DEPENDENCIES IN AMBIGUOUS ELLIPSES AND ONLY-STRUCTURES.

Linguistic accounts of anaphor resolution propose that a pronominal can either be resolved by a grammatical operation in logical syntax (i.e., variable binding) or through value assignment in the discourse (i.e., coreference). A consistent finding in offline studies on the interpretation of ambiguous VP-ellipses is that bound-variable dependencies have a privileged status. The online evidence, on the other hand, is almost absent. In two experiments (one questionnaire and one eye-tracking experiment) we show that the binding preference is not solely an offline phenomenon, but can be detected in real-time measures of language comprehension. Furthermore, and in contrast to an earlier claim (Frazier & Clifton 2000), the binding preference of the language processor is not restricted to elliptic structures, but emerges in ambiguous structures with the ow(y-operator as well. The implications of these results are discussed in the light of a linguistic model of anaphoric comprehension, that is, the Primitives of Binding framework (Reuland, 2001) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]