Abstract (may include machine translation)
In light verb constructions, such as Henry gave Elsa a kiss, Henry is the kisser, and Elsa the 'kiss-ee', even though the main verbal predicate is give, not kiss. In these constructions, argument linking results from joint predication between give and a kiss, which reveals mismatching syntactic and semantic structures. We test two approaches to light verb constructions: (1) joint predication in light verb constructions is stored as pre-specified, and their high frequency predicts less processing cost. (2) Joint predication in light verb constructions is built in real-time. The entailed extra-syntactic composition predicts greater cost. Results from a cross-modal lexical decision task show delayed, higher reaction times for light verb constructions, supporting (2), which is consistent with a linguistic architecture that has partly autonomous lexico-semantic storage and processing.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 393-413 |
Number of pages | 21 |
Journal | Mental Lexicon |
Volume | 6 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2011 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Argument structure
- Crossmodal lexical decision
- Light verb construction
- Linguistic architecture
- Processing
- Semantic composition
- Syntactic composition