The article is a contribution to a long-standing discussion on how idioms are represented and accessed in the mental lexicon. More specifically, in a timed cloze response study we investigate high and low syntactic flexibility idioms in Polish in order to find out whether the degree of syntactic flexibility influences the ease and time of idioms’ recognition. By doing so we contribute to the question of whether idioms are differently represented in the lexicon depending on their syntactic flexibility, as suggested by Nunberg et al. 1994 and Gibbs and Nayak 1989, or whether all idioms independent of their syntactic flexibility are represented lexically in the same hybrid way, as suggested by Cutting and Bock 1997 and Sprenger et al. 2006. The results of our study support the latter view.

This paper is a contribution to a long-standing discussion related to the domain of aspectual interpretation. More precisely, it focuses on the impact of the degree of specificity and morphological complexity on the time course of processing of perfective (prefixed perfective and semelfactive perfective) and imperfective (simple imperfective and iterative imperfective) verbs in Polish. In two experiments, eye-tracking during reading and self-paced reading, we tested a hypothesis based on Frisson & Pickering (1999), Pickering & Frisson (2001) and Frisson (2009) that the interpretation of semantically underspecified verbs should be delayed to the end of a sentence. As predicted, in both of the reported experiments significantly longer reading measures were observed for aspectually underspecified simple imperfective verbs as compared to aspectually more specific perfective verbs in the sentence-final region. Our second major prediction was that morphological complexity of aspectual forms should cause computational cost directly on the verbal region. As predicted, significantly longer reading times were observed on morphologically complex (prefixed) perfective verbs and (suffixed) semelfactive perfective verbs as compared to their morphologically simple imperfective counterparts in the eye-tracking experiment. This effect was not confirmed in the self-paced reading experiment. This difference between the results obtained in the two reported experiments is attributed to the differences between the methods used.

This study aims to account for the variation in aspect choices in factual imperfective contexts in Polish, Czech, and Russian. A series of online questionnaires were conducted wherein the native speakers of the tested languages were asked to fill in the missing verbs for two types of existential contexts (neutral and resultative) and four types of presuppositional factual contexts (weakly and strongly resultative with a focus on the initiator or the result state of the past event). We show that neutral existential factual contexts generally elicited significantly more imperfective choices than resultative existential factual contexts. Additionally, there was a trend towards a higher usage of imperfective in weakly resultative presuppositional contexts as compared to strongly resultative presuppositional contexts, suggesting that the less emphasis is placed on the result state the more likely the choice of imperfective aspect is for the expression of the temporal indefiniteness of factual contexts. Russian showed a significantly higher proportion of imperfective uses than Polish and Czech, with Czech being intermediate. We argue that these observations result from the fact that in all types of factual contexts (both existential and presuppositional) there is an interaction between two types of TEMPORAL (IN)DEFINITENESS of the past event: (i) temporal (in)definiteness at the micro-level (first phase syntax-vP) (depending on the position of the time variable within the temporal event of the past complex event) and (ii) (in)definiteness of the past event at the macro-level (second phase syntax–AspP and TP) (related to the position of the past event relative to the utterance time). We show that both discourse-level information and verb-level information interact in determining these two types of (in)definiteness, and they do it differently in Polish, Czech, and Russian.

Traditionally, languages are assumed to minimally manifest a distinction between nouns and verbs. This assumption has occasionally been debated in the theoretical linguistic literature, in particular in the context of challenging verbal noun constructions that simultaneously manifest nominal and verbal features. From a psycholinguistic perspective, one of the most promising diagnostic criteria for determining whether a given word belongs to the category NOUN or VERB is an event-related brain potential (ERP) component, P200, whose amplitude is larger for verbs than for nouns. So far, a challenge for the interpretation of the P200 has been whether this component reflects verbal (e.g., action) semantics, lexical category or verb-related morphological operation.In the present study we report an ERP experiment whose goal was to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of the "verbal" P200 component by monitoring the comprehension of Polish morphologically related finite verbs, converbs, and verbal nouns. Thereby, we manipulated the syntactic category and morphological complexity of the critical words while keeping their semantics identical. The results show that finite verbs engender a smaller amplitude of the P200 component than less prototypical "verbs" such as verbal nouns and converbs. Based on this observation, we argue that the P200 component reflects the brain activation triggered by the demands of verb-related morphological integration processes performed on the verbal base of derived forms.

In this paper we intend to provide aunified picture of the organization of knowledge about nouns and verbs in the mind emerging from the results of recent foundational studies that use av ariety of different experimental techniques and research methods rangingf rom processing experiments, languagea cquisition and aphasia studies to more advanced neurophysiological and neuroimagings tudies. Each of the authors of the articles discussed in the present paper attempts to show that the distinction between nouns and verbs originates only(or mainly) at one of the following levels: the conceptual-semantic, the lexical or the morphological level. Our overview points to ac onclusiont hat the knowledge about verbs and nouns in the mind cannot be attributed to as ingle level, but rather it seems to be the case that it is organized in the form of ad istributed network of specialized functions in which manyp rocesses related to noun or verb processing mayh appen in ap arallel fashion. Even though in some respects the presented studies do not entirelyl ead to ac oherent picture of what happens in the brain when people process nouns and verbs, it is still possiblet of ind overlapping results. Fore xample, nominal and verbalc oncepts of objects or actions are processedinthe vicinity of the visual and motor cortex respectively.L exical (orthographic and phonological) representations of nouns and verbs are stored in mid temporala nd left frontal cortex respectively. Noun-and verb-dependent morphological operations happen in left anterior occipitotemporal gyrus and prefrontal/frontotemporalc ortex respectively.