Investigating the Interplay Between Morphosyntax and Event Comprehension From the Perspective of Intersecting Object Histories

In a series of sentence-picture verification studies we contrasted, for example, horizontal ellipsis choose the balloon with horizontal ellipsis inflate the balloon and horizontal ellipsis the inflated balloon to examine the degree to which different representational components of event representation (specifically, the different object states entailed by the inflating event; minimally, the balloon in its uninflated and inflated states) are jointly activated after state-change verbs and past participles derived from them. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the initial and end states are both activated after state-change verbs, but that the initial state is considerably less accessible after participles. Experiment 3 showed that intensifier adverbs (e.g., completely) before both state-change verbs and participles further modulate the accessibility of the initial state. And in Experiment 4, we ruled out the possibility that the initial state is accessible only because of the semantic overlap. We conclude that although state-change verbs activate representations of both the initial and end states of their event participants, their accessibility is graded, modulated by the morphosyntactic devices used to describe the event.

Automated summary

In a series of sentence-picture verification studies, we found that state-change verbs and past participles activate representations of both the initial and end states of their event participants to different degrees, and this accessibility is modulated by morphosyntactic devices.