The influence of semantic context on verb argument structure processing was investigated in two experiments using both ERP and behavioral measures. Participants were presented with sentences ending with syntactically and/or semantically congruous or incongruous noun phrases and they were asked to judge the overall acceptability of the sentences. Syntactically incongruous sentences contained an intransitive verb followed by a direct object (e.g., *L’ennemi a conspiré (INTR) un complot *‘The enemy conspired a scheme’). In line with our hypothesis, results showed that the processing of syntactic incongruities was influenced by the degree of semantic congruency between the different sentence constituents (strong in Experiment 1 and weak in Experiment 2). Thus, the same syntactic incongruity was processed differently depending upon the semantic context of the sentence, thereby demonstrating the influence of semantic context on syntactic processing. We propose a linguistic account of the differential effects of verb transitivity as a function of the semantic context based upon Cognitive Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics.

The current study investigates the conceptual hierarchy of humans−animals−plants−non-animate objects by using novel hybrids. Three experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, twenty-one participants were presented with a grammatically asymmetrical phrase, in which the two components are associated with different linguistic properties, (e.g., a man with a horse’s head) followed by a visual hybrid, and were asked to judge whether the phrase described the hybrid. In Experiment 2, thirty participants were presented with a visual hybrid and were asked to categorize it according to one of its visually presented components in a forced-choice judgment task. In Experiment 3, twenty-nine participants were presented with a visual hybrid that followed a grammatically symmetrical phrase, in which both components carry similar grammatical properties (e.g., half-human half-horse), and were asked to judge whether the phrase described the hybrid. A conceptual hierarchy effect was found in Experiment 1 but not in the other two experiments. These findings show that the hierarchy effect occurs only in verbal tasks that involve asymmetrical grammatical constructions. We suggest that the pragmatic tendency to map the hierarchically higher concept onto the higher grammatical function applies to asymmetrical constructions but not to symmetrical constructions.

Long-distance dependencies are notoriously difficult to analyze in a formally explicit way because they involve constituents that seem to have been extracted from their canonical position in an utterance. The most widespread solution is to identify a gap at an extraction site and to communicate information about that gap to its filler, as in What_FILLERdid you see_GAP? This paper rejects the filler−gap solution and proposes a cognitive-functional alternative in which long-distance dependencies spontaneously emerge as a side effect of how grammatical constructions interact with each other for expressing different conceptualizations. The proposal is supported by a computational implementation in Fluid Construction Grammar that works for both parsing and production.

In certain English finite complement clauses, inclusion of the complementizer that is optional. Previous research has identified various factors that influence when native speakers tend to produce or omit the complementizer, including syntactic weight, clause juncture constraints, and predicate frequency. The present study addresses the question to what extent German and Spanish learners of English as a second language (L2) produce and omit the complementizer under similar conditions. 3,622 instances of English adjectival, object, and subject complement constructions were retrieved from the International Corpus of English and the German and Spanish components of the International Corpus of Learner English. A logistic regression model suggests that L2 learners’ and natives’ production is largely governed by the same factors. However, in comparison with native speakers, L2 learners display a lower rate of complementizer omission. They are more impacted by processing-related factors such as complexity and clause juncture, and less sensitive to verb-construction cue validity.