Ambiguity and Sentence Position: An Experimental Case Study on Manner Adverbs91
Abstract: Wasow (this volume) looks at ambiguity from the perspective of language production and concludes that speakers disobey the principle ‘Avoid ambiguity’ on many occasions. This paper looks at ambiguity from the perspective of language comprehension. The question is whether readers use specific information, namely the position of a word in a sentence for disambiguation. I will present an experimental study on ambiguous adverbs in German. The aim of the study is to differentiate between two approaches to position-driven differences in adverb interpretation and to show that experimental data have an important share in investigating ambiguity. ...
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