Thematic role focusing by participle inflections: evidence from conceptual combination.

Full Abstract

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.

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Author information

Author/s: Ferretti, Todd R (TR); Gagné, Christina L (CL); McRae, Ken (K);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. tferrett(-atsign-)wiu.ca

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Jan; vol 29 (issue 1) : pp 118-27

Dates: Created 2003/01/28; Completed 2003/05/01; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12549588, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Analysis of Variance
Humans
Linguistics - methods

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