Processing light verb constructions

Eva Wittenberg*, Maria Mercedes Piñango

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)393-413
Number of pages21
JournalMental Lexicon
Volume6
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Argument structure
  • Crossmodal lexical decision
  • Light verb construction
  • Linguistic architecture
  • Processing
  • Semantic composition
  • Syntactic composition

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