This paper presents event-related brain potential (ERP) data from an experiment on syntactic processing, focusing on the Syntactic Positive Shift (SPS). The study investigates three types of syntactic violations in Dutch: agreement violations, subcategorization violations, and phrase structure violations. The ERP results provide evidence for a distinct electrophysiological response to syntactic processing, which is qualitatively different from the responses observed in semantic processing. The SPS was observed in an experiment where subjects were simply asked to read the sentences without additional task demands. The ERP responses to different types of syntactic violations suggest that the SPS indicates the parser's inability to assign the preferred structure to an incoming string of words, regardless of the specific syntactic nature of the preferred structure. The findings have implications for further research on parsing, particularly in understanding the nature of the parser and the interaction between syntactic and semantic/pragmatic processing. The study also discusses the limitations of previous ERP research on parsing and the need for more studies in different languages to validate the findings.This paper presents event-related brain potential (ERP) data from an experiment on syntactic processing, focusing on the Syntactic Positive Shift (SPS). The study investigates three types of syntactic violations in Dutch: agreement violations, subcategorization violations, and phrase structure violations. The ERP results provide evidence for a distinct electrophysiological response to syntactic processing, which is qualitatively different from the responses observed in semantic processing. The SPS was observed in an experiment where subjects were simply asked to read the sentences without additional task demands. The ERP responses to different types of syntactic violations suggest that the SPS indicates the parser's inability to assign the preferred structure to an incoming string of words, regardless of the specific syntactic nature of the preferred structure. The findings have implications for further research on parsing, particularly in understanding the nature of the parser and the interaction between syntactic and semantic/pragmatic processing. The study also discusses the limitations of previous ERP research on parsing and the need for more studies in different languages to validate the findings.