engleski

The syntactic structure of the verb: eyetracking evidence for argument structure building

It is well known that the verb plays a central role in a sentence. It opens positions for the elements of its arugment structure. Eyetracking studies (Altman & Kamide, 1999, Boland, 2007) show that in listening paradigms verb triggers anticipatory eye movements that are related either to the argument structure building or to the world knowledge. However, listening paradigms cannot decide between the two possible interpretations. In this study we employed a more direct approach to make a choice between the two possible interpretations: instead of listening paradigm and anticipatory gaze we used a simple reading paradigm. In addition, the relevant part of the argument structure was given as personal pronouns thus excluding the influence of world knowledge. Croatian, as a Slavic language, offers opportunity to use aspectual pairs (e.g. piti 'to drink (imperfective)' and popiti 'to drink (perfective)') to change the Aktionsart and the arugment structure of the verb. The sentences consisted of two clauses and were constructed as garden-path sentences in which the target word (the personal pronoun) could be understood as an argument of the verbs in both clauses of the sentence. By manipulating the aspect of the verb (using the aspectual pairs), its Aktionsart changes, as well, thus bringing about the change in the argument structure - in one reading the pronoun can be an argument of the first verb, in the other, only the second. The fixation time on the target word reveals the differences in the reinterpretation processes that can be traced only to the differences in the argument structure between the aspectual pairs of the verbs. The results are analyzed in terms of difference in cognitive processing costs between the experimental conditions as fixation durations and regressions (backward saccades). They reveal the "hidden" syntactic structure that goes ahead of the speaker's position in a sentence facilitating the "top-down" processes in sentence comprehension (reading).

eyetracking; argument structure; aspect

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