The topic addressed in this volume lies within the study of sentence processing, which is one of the major divisions of psycholinguistics. The goal has been to understand the structure and functioning of the mental mechanisms involved in sentence comprehension. Most of the experimental and theoretical work during the last twenty or thirty years has focused on 'first-pass parsing', the process of assigning structure to a sentence as its words are encountered, one at a time, 'from left to right' . One important guiding idea has been to delineate the processing mechanisms by studying where they...

The study of opacity falls under the general programme of showing how the meaning of any complex sentence is composed from the meanings of its constituent clauses, phrases and words. Opaque constructions are special from this point of view because the compositional principles that determine their meaning are so intricate. The main argument of this book is that the systematic ambiguity of opaque constructions has generally been underestimated.

The study of opacity falls under the general programme of showing how the meaning of any complex sentence is composed from the meanings of its constituent clauses, phrases and words. Opaque constructions are special from this point of view because the compositional principles that determine their meaning are so intricate. The main argument of this book is that the systematic ambiguity of opaque constructions has generally been underestimated.