Abstract We report five experiments that deal with the role of verb selectional restrictions and the animacy of nouns in the construction and interpretation of syntactic structure. In the first two experiments, the effect of the selectional restriction requirements of verbs and the animacy of nouns on sentence comprehension was assessed in a speeded acceptability judgement task. Four sentence types were presented in which syntactic complexity (object vs subject relativisation) and number of propositions were orthogonally varied. Sentences contained verbs that required either animate subjects or animate objects, and unacceptable sentences were created by violating the selectional restriction requirements of the verb in the embedded clause. Analyses of both reaction time and accuracy data showed that there was an interaction between the selectional restriction requirements of verbs (which correlated perfectly with the animacy of nouns in subject or object position), and syntactic form, on these judgments. E...