Various syntactic theories (HPSG, GPSG, minimalism, construction grammars) from linguistics are certainly derived constructs, but most researchers would agree that they all reflect real abstractions that humans make. I think the NLP community has good a job of harvesting the substantive aspects (which tend to be fairly conventionalized upon across theories) without overfitting on specific cases. &quot;Alice drove down the street in her car&quot; is easy for people to process, &quot;The horse raced past the barn fell&quot; is not, because it requires a pretty drastic reinterpretation of the structure when you get to the last word.<p>That said, there is some interesting work on &quot;good-enough&quot; language processing, which suggests that people maintain some fuzziness and don&#x27;t fully resolve the structure when they don&#x27;t need to. [1]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu&#x2F;proceedings&#x2F;2009&#x2F;papers&#x2F;75&#x2F;paper75.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu&#x2F;proceedings&#x2F;2009&#x2F;papers&#x2F;75&#x2F;...</a>