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D. R. Dowty, L. Karttunen & A. M. Zwicky (eds) Natural language parsing: psychological, computational and theoretical perspectives . (Studies in Natural Language Processing Series.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. xiii + 413.

This collection contains nine substantial papers and two shorter ones on topics ranging from the comparative syntax and semantics of Scandinavian and English constituent questions, through a variety of computational and psychological models of parsing, to evaluation of the formal properties of syntactic theories, and finally, purely experimental work on human language comprehension. The quality of these papers varies considerably; nevertheless, the overriding impression that one gets is that interesting and valuable research is being done in the general area of syntactic processing of language within departments of linguistics, psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence. The impression one does not get is that there is anything like a unified or genuinely multi-disciplinary research programme on parsing. The editors' introduction is indicative in this respect; they describe work on parsing within each of the disciplines and sketch similarities and points of contact, then they summarise each contribution as an independent entity. One might ask, therefore, why such a collection of diverse papers is justified. However, perhaps this is unfair; it does seem that scholars of parsing are gradually beginning to take note of the contribution of colleagues from other fields and if this volume serves to accelerate that process all the better. I shall make no attempt to do full justice to every contribution, but rather identify a few of the issues discussed which may interest linguists. The first of these is the notion of functional, 'external' explanation of language data via an account of human syntactic parsing. In her paper on constituent questions, Engdahl (Chapter 2) argues that correlations between constraints on wide-scope interpretation and extraction are explicable if we assume that the same processing mechanism Cooper storage underlies the analysis of both. Similarly, Joshi (Chapter 5) suggests that constraints on intra-sentential code-switching may facilitate parsing by reducing the amount of local ambiguity concerning which grammar the listener should be deploying at any one point during the utterance. However, both of these 'explanations' are tentative and partial (as the authors themselves point out). In a long and thought provoking article which attempts to define a syntactic complexity metric for sentence processing, Frazier (Chapter 4) argues that there is little evidence that natural language grammars have evolved to ease parsing by reducing the incidence of local ambiguities, and certainly none of the examples of this kind of argumentation in the book are likely to convince readers otherwise. The theory of parsing strategies is addressed in several papers. Periera (Chapter 9) demonstrates that a precisely defined parsing algorithm the LALR( I) algorithm, often used for parsing programming languages can be used to model Right Association and Minimal Attachment. He argues convincingly that this approach is both simpler and more rigorous than psycholinguists' attempts to formulate parsers which incorporate such strategies (eg. Frazier & Fodor, 1978). However, Periera is careful to point out that he is making no claims regarding the psychological plausibility of these strategies. This is wise in view of the important contribution by Crain and Steedman (Chapter 10), who argue that the theory of parsing strategies is fundamentally inadequate. They suggest that purely 'structural' strategies are unlikely to form the main mechanism for resolving syntactic ambiguity in natural language comprehension because the high degree of (local and global) ambiguity tolerated in natural language grammars would make such an approach of limited utility. Crain and Steedmans' theoretical argument is convincing but, as Frazier points out in her paper, there are several experimental results in the literature which appear to support the psychological reality of parsing strategies. Crain and Steedman report two experiments which demonstrate that subjects will correctly interpret strategy-violating 'garden path' sentences if they are presented in a felicitous context and misinterpret non-strategy-violating locally ambiguous sentences presented in an infelicitous context. These results demonstrate that a purely autonomous account of human parsing based on parsing strategies is inadequate and suggest that the results Frazier refers to should be reinterpreted. It is noteworthy, in this context, that these experiments involved presentation of