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 |
|---|---|
| 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