Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The increasing lexicalization of syntactic theories poses new difficulties for incremental models of language processing. In this paper, we describe an incremental interpreter that makes use of knowledge on categories to keep the syntactic structure always connected. This, in turn, guarantees a fine-grained syntax-semantics interaction. The paper introduces the general problem of formalizing the notion of incremental interpretation, and analyzes the current approaches in the cognitive literature.