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<Paper uid="C90-3027">
  <Title>A Constraint-Based Approach to Linguistic Performance*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Language and Constraint
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> From tile constraint-based perspective immediately follows a hypothesis tI'lat the same constraints (i.e., lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and whatever), corresponding to (1), and the same processing architecture, corresponding to (2), should underly both sentence comprehension and production. Other authors have expressed less radical stances. For instance, Kay \[11\] adopts two different grammars for parsing and generation. Our hypothesis is also stronger than Shieber's \[16\]; Although he proposes to share not only one grammar but also one processing architecture between the two tasks, this 'common' architecture is, unlike ours, parameterized so as to adapt itself to parsing and generation in accordance with different parameter settings. null  As a corollary of our strong uniformity hypothesis, we reject every approach postulating any procedure specific to sentence comprehension or production. For instance, we disagree upon the ways in which the Determinism Hypothesis (DH) \[12\] has been instantiated so far. DH permits to assume only one partial structure of a sentence at a time, and the approaches along this line \[2, 3, 12, 14\] has postulated, beyond necessity, specific ways of disambiguation for specific types of ambiguity in sentence comprehension and production.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Instead we view sentence processing as parallel computation. When a sentence is either comprehended or produced, several partial structures of it, we assume, are simultaneously hypothesized. The degree of parallelism should be limited to fall within the small capacity of the short-term memory (STM), so that we obtain the same sort of predictions as we do along the determinist account. For instance, the difficulty in comprehending garden path sentences like (3) may be attributed to the difficulty of keeping some structural hypotheses in STM.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> (3) The chocolate cakes are coated with tastes sweet.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> As discussed below, our approach quantitatively estimates the difficulty in processing embedded constructions like (4) also on the basis of the memory limitation. null (4) The cheese the rat the cat the dog chased caught bit was rotten.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Since DH does not account for such difficulty, incidentally, it seems superfluous to postulate DH. We consider DH jnst~ as approximation of severe memory limitation, and avoid any stipulation of such a hypothesis.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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