Journal
LANGUAGE COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 29, Issue 5, Pages 635-641Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2013.831918
Keywords
events; argument structure; conceptualization; sorting task; syntax; semantics; light-verb constructions
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Funding
- NSF Grant [0921012]
- German National Academic Foundation
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Language is characterised by broad and predictable mappings between meaning and syntactic form. Transitive sentences typically encode two-participant events while ditransitives typically encode three-participant events. Light-verb constructions, however, systematically violate these mappings; for example, some have ditransitive syntax ('Romeo is giving Juliet a kiss') but describe what appear to be agent-patient events (Romeo kissing Juliet). We used a conceptual sorting task to explore whether this non-canonical mapping influenced the interpretation of these sentences. Participants were trained to sort events by the number of thematic roles they encoded. After a training phase with only pictures, they sorted a mix of pictures and written sentences, including transitive agent-patient sentences, ditransitive source-theme-goal sentences and ditransitive light-verb constructions. Events described by light-verb constructions were most often grouped with agent-patient events but were sometimes grouped with source-theme-goal events. A control condition using the transitive/intransitive alternation for joint action verbs (e. g., 'meet') demonstrates that this is not attributable to misconstruing the task as syntactic sorting. We conclude that non-canonical mappings between meaning and form can affect event construal, but syntactic form does not solely determine the construal that is chosen.
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