Syntax As Static Representation and Dynamic Process Zenzi M. Griffin Part of the legacy that formal linguistics has passed on to psycholinguistic research is a bias to conceptualize syntax in terms of static representations such as trees, subcategorization frames, or combinatorial nodes and to adopt a syntactocentric view of sentence production in which syntax severely constrains the expression of messages. In such views, early commitment to syntactic plans is seen as increasing the fluency of speech by reducing the choices a speaker must make but at the cost of flexibility (e.g., Ferreira, 2000; Pickering & Branigan, 1998). In alternative proposals, syntax is viewed as a process for imposing linear order on message elements while expressing the relationships between them (e.g., Chang et al., 2000). In such views, incremental structure-related decisions maximize speaker flexibility (e.g., Wasow, 1997), although this may be at the cost of fluency. In this paper, I will review the processing implications of each view, summarize and critique the speech data used to support each view, and discuss potential reconciliations.