Unaccusativity in Sentence Production

Bibliographic Data

ID10719366
AuthorsShota Momma (0000-0002-2567-4517, University of California San Diego), L Robert Slevc (0000-0002-5183-6786, University of Maryland), Colin Phillips (0000-0002-3886-3384, University of Maryland)
Year2018
Volume49
Issue1
Pages181-194
Publication date2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistic Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0024-3892 • E-ISSN: 1530-9150
PublisherMIT Press - Journals (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1162/ling_a_00271
OpenAlexW2782804236
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited28

Linguistic analyses suggest that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives, whose sole argument is a patient or theme (e.g., fall), and unergatives, whose sole argument is an agent (e.g., jump). 1 Past psycholinguistic experiments suggest that this distinction affects how sentences are processed: for example, it modulates both comprehension processes ( Bever and Sanz 1997 , Friedmann et al. 2008 ) and production processes ( Kegl 1995 , Kim 2006 , M. Lee and Thompson 2004 , J. Lee and Thompson 2011 , McAllister et al. 2009 ). Given this body of evidence, it is reasonable to assume, as we do here, that this distinction is directly relevant to psycholinguistic theorizing. However, especially in production, exactly how this distinction affects processing is unknown, beyond the suggestion that unaccusatives somehow involve more complex processing than unergatives (see J. Lee and Thompson 2011 ). Here we examine how real-time planning processes in production differ for unaccusatives and unergatives. We build on previous studies on lookahead effects in sentence planning that show that verbs are planned before a deep object is uttered but not before a deep subject is uttered ( Momma, Slevc, and Phillips 2015 , 2016 ). (We use terms like deep subject in a theory-neutral fashion, with no intended commitment to a specific syntactic encoding.) This line of research sheds light on the broader issue of how the theory of argument structure relates to sentence production

Argument (complex analysis) · Comprehension · Linguistics · Object (grammar) · Production (economics) · Sentence · Sentence processing · Subject (documents) · Theme (computing) · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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