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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.
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.
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).