Syntax, Preference, and Right Attachment

Abstract

The paper claims that the right attachment rules for phrases originally suggested by Frazier and Fodor are wrong, and that none of the subsequent patchings of the rules by syntactic methods have improved the situation. For each rule there are perfectly straightforward and indefinitely large classes of simple counterexamples. We then examine suggestions by Ford et al., Schubert and Hirst which are quasi-semantic in nature and which we consider ingenious but unsatisfactory. We offer a straightforward solution within the framework of preference semantics, and argue that the principal issue is not the type and nature of information required to get appropriate phrase attachments, but the issue of where to store the information and with what processes to apply it. We present a prolog implementation of a best first algorithm covering the data and contrast it with closely related ones, all of which are based on the preferences of nouns and prepositions, as well as verbs.