Effects of Short-Term Storage in Processing Rightward Movement

Abstract

There is a striking asymmetry between leftward and rightward movement in syntax: whereas leftward movement can in principle be unbounded, rightward movement is subject to very strict locality conditions. There are two possible approaches to explaining this asymmetry. One can either assume that some syntactic principle disfavours rightward movement, or that some mechanism having to do with sentence processing is responsible. In this chapter we will argue that a processing approach to limitations on rightward movement is more fruitful. In particular, we will argue that the human parser cannot process certain instances of rightward movement because the introduction of an antecedent-trace relation leads to a conflict with information about the parse which is already stored in short-term memory before this relation can be established. Similar problems do not occur in cases of leftward movement.