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Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.
We investigate whether prototypicality or prominence of semantic roles can account for role-related effects in sentence interpretation. We present two acceptability-rating experiments testing three different constructions: active, personal passive and DO-clefts involving the same type of transitive verbs that differ with respect to the agentive role features they select. Our results reveal that there is no cross-constructional advantage for prototypical roles (e.g., agents), hence disconfirming a central tenet of role prototypicality. Rather, acceptability clines depend on the construction under investigation, thereby highlighting different role features. This finding is in line with one core assumption of the prominence account stating that role features are flexibly highlighted depending on the discourse function of the respective construction.
What is a sentient agent?
(2018)
The present paper reports two acceptability-rating experiments and a supporting corpus study for Polish that tested the acceptability and frequency of five verb classes (WATCH, SEE, HATE, KNOW, EXHIBIT), entailing different sets of agentivity features, in different syntactic constructions: a) the personal passive (e.g. zachód słońca był oglądany ‘the sunset was watched’), b) the impersonal -no/-to construction (e.g. oglądano zachód słońca ‘people/they/one watched the sunset’), and c) the personal active construction (e.g. niektórzy oglądali zachód słońca ‘some (people) watched the sunset’). We asked whether acceptability ratings would show identical acceptability clines across constructions affected by agentivity, as predicted from Dowty’s (1991) prototype account of semantic roles with feature accumulation as its central mechanism, or whether clines would vary depending on syntactic construction, as predicted from Himmelmann & Primus’ (2015) prominence account that uses feature weighting to describe role-related effects. In contrasting the applicability of these two accounts, we also investigated whether previous research findings from German replicate in Polish, thereby revealing cross-linguistic stability or variation. Our results show that the five verb classes yield different acceptability clines in all three Polish constructions and that the clines for Polish and German passives show cross-linguistic variation. This pattern cannot be explained by role prototypicality, so that the experiments provide further evidence for the prominence account of role-related effects in sentence interpretation. Moreover, our data suggest that experiencer verbs interact differently with the animacy of the subject referent, yielding different results for perception verbs (SEE), emotion verbs (HATE), and cognition verbs (KNOW).
Lexikonprojektion und Konstruktion: Experimentelle Studien zu Argumentalternationen im Deutschen
(2020)
Debates on lexicalist vs. constructionist modelling of argument alternations are typically based on data from single constructions, each including different types of verbs. Evidence from constructions with an identical set of verb types that systematically differ in their meaning is lacking, even though such evidence is imperative for specifically investigating the dependence of argument alternations on the interaction between construction and lexical meanings. We present two acceptability studies where verb lexeme meanings and constructions - specifically active voice, impersonal passive and the construction with man 'one' in German - vary systematically. Prima facie our results support a constructionist explanation, because each construction exhibits a unique acceptability cline. However, across constructions, an adequate explanation has to consider verb-based lexical meanings. The most plausible explanation is that the semantic features licensed by the construction are matched with the semantic features provided by the verb lexeme.
We present an event-related potentials (ERP) study that addresses the question of how pieces of information pertaining to semantic roles and event structure interact with each other and with the verb’s meaning. Specifically, our study investigates German verb-final clauses with verbs of motion such as fliegen ‘fly’ and schweben ‘float, hover,’ which are indeterminate with respect to agentivity and event structure. Agentivity was tested by manipulating the animacy of the subject noun phrase and event structure by selecting a goal adverbial, which makes the event telic, or a locative adverbial, which leads to an atelic reading. On the clause-initial subject, inanimates evoked an N400 effect vis-à-vis animates. On the adverbial phrase in the atelic (locative) condition, inanimates showed an N400 in comparison to animates. The telic (goal) condition exhibited a similar amplitude like the inanimate-atelic condition. Finally, at the verbal lexeme, the inanimate condition elicited an N400 effect against the animate condition in the telic (goal) contexts. In the atelic (locative) condition, items with animates evoked an N400 effect compared to inanimates. The combined set of findings suggest that clause-initial animacy is not sufficient for agent identification in German, which seems to be completed only at the verbal lexeme in our experiment. Here non-agents (inanimates) changing their location in a goal-directed way and agents (animates) lacking this property are dispreferred and this challenges the assumption that change of (locational) state is generally a defining characteristic of the patient role. Besides this main finding that sheds new light on role prototypicality, our data seem to indicate effects that, in our view, are related to complexity, i.e., minimality. Inanimate subjects or goal arguments increase processing costs since they have role or event structure restrictions that animate subjects or locative modifiers lack.
Dieser Beitrag thematisiert semantische Bedingungen des unpersönlichen Passivs im Deutschen und in anderen Sprachen. Traditionellerweise nimmt man an, dass nur atelische und agentivische Verben im unpersönlichen Passiv akzeptabel sind. Ich werde die empirischen Hypothesen der bisherigen Forschung auf der Grundlage von Akzeptabilitätsstudien und einer breiteren korpusbasierten Datenmenge revidieren. Die hier behandelten semantischen Aspekte wurden in einflussreichen Arbeiten als Evidenz für die Überlegenheit einer konstruktionsgrammatischen Herangehensweise gewertet. Ich werde diese Evidenz in Frage stellen und beschränkungsbasierte Alternativen präsentieren.
Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht grammatische Serialisierungsfaktoren und geht auf die semantische Rolle und die Rektion der Verbargumente näher ein. Das sind zwei unabhängige Faktoren der Wortstellung, die zwar gemeinsam auf einen allgemeinen multifaktoriellen Dependenzbegriff zurückgeführt, aber nicht voneinander abgeleitet werden können. Die wortstellungsrelevante Hierarchie von semantischen Rollen kann als Spezialfall semantischer Dependenzasymmetrien ausgewiesen werden. Auf der Grundlage dieses Dependenzbegriffs wird ein allgemeines Serialisierungsprinzip aufgestellt, das mehrere in der Forschung diskutierte Prinzipien zusammenfaßt. Die beiden Parameter der Dependenz können bei der Determination der Abfolge der Verbargumente in Abhängigkeit vom verblexemspezifischen Konstruktionstyp gegeneinander konkurrieren oder miteinander koalieren. Diese Interaktion wird im Rahmen eines Wettbewerbsmodells der Serialisierung präsentiert. Über die koalierende vs. konkurrierende Interaktion wird die konstruktionsspezifische festere vs. freiere Stellung der Verbargumente im Deutschen und im Sprachvergleich erklärt. Im sprachvergleichenden Teil werden ditransitive Konstruktionen mit Rezipient und Patiens in 50 europäischen Sprachen untersucht.
The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).