Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

I review evidence for the claim that syntactic ambiguities are resolved on the basis of the meaning of the competing analyses, not their structure. I identify a collection of ambiguities that d o not yet have a meaning-based account and propose one which is based on the interaction of discourse and grammatical function. I provide evidence for m y proposal by examining statistical properties of the Penn Treebank of syntactically annotated text.