Testing a Minimalist Grammar Parser on Italian Relative Clause Asymmetries

AbstractStabler’s (2013) top-down parser for Minimalist grammars has been used to account for off-line processing preferences across a variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena cross-linguistically, via complexity metrics measuring “memory burden”. This paper extends the empirical coverage of the model by looking at the processing asymmetries of Italian relative clauses, as I discuss the relevance of these constructions in evaluating plausible structure-driven models of processing difficulty.