parsing

[Ellen F. Prince]

i'm quite perplexed by matthew dryer's claim that people don't parse
they just interpret... how do you envision going from the phonological
or graphological (?) string to an interpretation without parsing? what
about ambiguous sentences like:

they can fish
they saw the man with the telescope

or the garden path types like:

the horse raced past the barn fell

or in fact any other sentence you can think of...

obviously, no one assumes that people need to be able to consciously label
items with parts of speech etc -- but clearly they know what's what -- and
they would have to come out with SOMETHING that would be formally equivalent
to a syntactic parse, it would seem. no???

btw, i'm in no way offering this as support for the parser hype we've just
seen!