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Event End-Point Primes the Undergoer Argument: Neurobiological Bases of Event Structure Processing

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Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 93))

Abstract

Telicity as an element of subatomic semantics is often formulated as a property of the verb referring to a change-of-state event (catch, vanish). Atelic verbs, on the other hand, refer to homogenous activities or states (tease, sleep). Telic, or change-of-state verbs infer existence of an affected event participant; thus telic verbs have been hypothesized to always assign the thematic role of the Patient, regardless of their transitivity status. The ERP data demonstrates that telicity is a salient cue for thematic role assignment during online comprehension, as the priming of the Patient by telic verbs is indexed by neurocognitive processes related to attention and cognitive load.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Homogeneity and atelicity are not correlated in all theoretical frameworks. The early definitions of atelicity were based on homogeneity (Vendler 1967); however, such definitions did not define grain size of a single event, making difficult the treatment of semelfactives. (Krifka 1989) defined atelicity using the notion of cumulativity; some recent works also suggest treating atelicity as simply non-telicity. Homogeneity, however, remains the most intuitively simple explanation of what it means for a predicate to be atelic.

  2. 2.

    Some languages, such as English or Dutch, require that the affected Patient is quantized in order for the VP to convey telic meaning. The use of bare mass nouns results in loss of telicity for the VP (cf. I ate fish. – I ate the fish.) The studies reviewed in this chapter all use quantized arguments.

  3. 3.

    Multiple arguments exist as to whether to consider (a)telicity to be a feature of the verb, the full predicate (verb and its arguments – cf. Bott, Chap. 8 in this volume), or the entire sentence, (cf. Partee 2004); it is possible that the answer to this question is language-specific (cf. Malaia 2004). The present experiments avoided coercion and mismatch in telicity, as could be introduced by certain arguments or adjuncts: in the telic conditions, both the verb and the entire VP were telic. Additionally, the analysis of ERP waveforms was performed on the verb as well as all words within the VP, so as not to bias the results toward either theoretical framework.

  4. 4.

    Unergatives are a subset of atelic verbs: those with only one argument. Telic verbs with one argument are also termed unaccusatives. The neuro-psychological reality of this linguistic distinction is supported by neuroimaging evidence (Shetreet et al. 2010).

  5. 5.

    While all one-argument telic verbs are unaccusatives, not all unaccusatives are necessarily telic: verbs such as melt, cool, warm can denote scalar events – e.g. “melt to some degree, but not completely”.

  6. 6.

    N100 is distinct from early left anterior negativity (ELAN) in that ELAN occurs in response to violations of word-category/phrase structure, and its cortical distribution is more left-lateralised or bilateral. The stimuli for the studies under discussion did not contain the violations evoking ELAN.

  7. 7.

    We did not predict a P600 in our experiment, since this component is task-dependent. Also, P600 can indicate syntactic or semantic repair; with our stimuli, neither was necessary: all stimulus sentences were completely grammatical, and made sense.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by NIH grant DC005241 and NSF 0345314 to Ronnie Wilbur.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Mind, Brain, and Education, University of Texas at Arlington, Planetarium Place, Hammond Hall #416, 19545, Arlington, 76019, TX, USA

    Evie Malaia

  2. Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, Heavilon Hall, 500 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, 47907, IN, USA

    Ronnie B. Wilbur & Christine Weber-Fox

Authors
  1. Evie Malaia
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  2. Ronnie B. Wilbur
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  3. Christine Weber-Fox
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Correspondence to Evie Malaia .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Higher Council for Scientific Research, Calle de Serrano 117, Madrid, 28008, Madrid, Spain

    Boban Arsenijević

  2. , Dept. of Translation & Lang. Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University, c/Roc Boronat 138, Barcelona, 08018, Spain

    Berit Gehrke

  3. , UMR 8163 (STL), University of Lille 3, Rue du Barreau - BP 60149, Villeneuve d’Ascq Cedex, 59653, Nord, France

    Rafael Marín

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Malaia, E., Wilbur, R.B., Weber-Fox, C. (2013). Event End-Point Primes the Undergoer Argument: Neurobiological Bases of Event Structure Processing. In: Arsenijević, B., Gehrke, B., Marín, R. (eds) Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5983-1_9

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