Abstract
Mazuka and Lust (M&L) bring up the issue of how easy or difficult it is to parse left-branching (LB) (or head-final) languages such as Japanese. Specifically they argue that a strict ‘top-down’ parser which is customarily assumed for right-branching (RB) (or head-initial) languages like English does not facilitate parsing LB languages, proposing a ‘bottomup’ parser for Japanese. Since the majority of past research on parsing has been based on RB languages, it is of particular importance to examine what problems LB languages bring up in finding out the universality of human language parsing and in developing a universal parser. Exactly in this respect, I find their paper interesting and worthy of careful review.1
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Hasegawa, N. (1990). Comments on Mazuka and Lust’s Paper. In: Frazier, L., De Villiers, J. (eds) Language Processing and Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3808-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3808-6_8
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