Exploring the minimal structure in prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities: Evidence from Greek

This paper investigates prepositional phrase attachment preferences in Greek V-NP-PP structures. Native Greek speakers’ attachment preferences were investigated through an off-line acceptability task and an on-line self-paced grammaticality judgment task. The experimental sentences include Greek V-NP-PP sentences in which four Greek prepositions were inserted (me [with], se [in, into], ja [for], apo [from, by]) so as to examine possible lexical effects that may stem from the lexicosemantic properties of each preposition. In addition, the influence of Definiteness Agreement, a language-specific grammatical phenomenon in Modern Greek, was investigated in the experimental data by varying the definiteness of the NP complement of P. The results indicate an initial VP-attachment preference consistent with principles of syntax-based models of sentence processing (Minimal Attachment, Minimal Everything). In addition, the influence of Definiteness Agreement in the NP domain was evident both in the on-line and in the off-line data suggesting that attachment preferences may also be influenced by language-specific grammatical properties.