Thematic Role Focusing by Participle Inflections: Evidence From Conceptual Combination

The authors examined how people integrate knowledge of agents and patients of events with the temporal and causal properties of present and past participles to constrain interpretation of isolated participle-noun phrases like arresting cop and arrested crook . Good-agent head nouns were more easily...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2003-01, Vol.29 (1), p.118-127
Main Authors: Ferretti, Todd R, Gagné, Christina L, McRae, Ken
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Comprehension
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Inflection
Knowledge
Language
Linguistics - methods
Phrases
Production and perception of written language
Psycholinguistics
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Random Allocation
Semantics
Syntax
Verbal Learning
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Summary:The authors examined how people integrate knowledge of agents and patients of events with the temporal and causal properties of present and past participles to constrain interpretation of isolated participle-noun phrases like arresting cop and arrested crook . Good-agent head nouns were more easily combined with present participles (e.g., arresting cop ) than with past participles (e.g., arrested cop ), and the reverse was true for good patients. Furthermore, present-participle good-patient phrases (e.g., serving customer ) were often interpreted as verb phrases. This research provides further evidence of the interaction between morphosyntactic cues and world knowledge of events in language comprehension.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.29.1.118