Animacy, Generalized Semantic Roles, and Differential Object Marking

Primus, Beatrice

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-1463-2_4

Cited by 65 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…An essential part of sentence comprehension is distinguishing the sentential arguments and interpreting their respective thematic roles (i.e., establishing 'who does what to whom'; see Dowty, 1991;Primus, 2011). In many languages, especially those with relatively free word order, thematic interpretation is guided by a case system that marks the grammatical functions of arguments such as subject and object (e.g., Fillmore, 1968).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Animate, definite and first-mentioned entities are more prominent than inanimate, indefinite and later-mentioned entities. According to the distinctness principle (e.g., Lamers & De Hoop, 2005;Primus, 2011), thematic role identification is facilitated when all arguments in a described event are as distinct as possible from one another in terms of all available dimensions of prominence. The sentence ''John ate an apple'' is canonical because it describes a definite, animate subject followed by an indefinite, inanimate object, whereas ''The apple disgusted John'' is atypical because it contains an animate object that is more agentive than the subject.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Castilian Spanish, the language used here, animacy is among the most important features that controls object marking (e.g., Garcia Garcia, 2007; see also Leonetti, 2004): the differential object marker, the prepositional accusative (or, personal) 'a', is required for definite and specific direct objects when the object is animate but ungrammatical for inanimate objects (e.g., ''Natxo escuchó a Agata/ Ã a la canción'': Natxo listened to Agata/the song). Differential object marking has been explained in terms of prominence/markedness (e.g., Aissen, 2003;but see García García, 2007): because animate objects are less prototypical, and therefore more prominent direct objects, they are linguistically marked and receive case-marking, whereas economy dictates that case-marking should be omitted in other situations (see also Primus, 2011). Object marking thus makes thematic interpretation proceed more smoothly in face of atypical, agentive objects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

2013

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a b s t r a c tThe animacy distinction is deeply rooted in the language faculty. A key example is differential object marking, the phenomenon where animate sentential objects receive specific marking. We used eventrelated potentials to examine the neural processing consequences of case-marking violations on animate and inanimate direct objects in Spanish. Inanimate objects with incorrect prepositional case marker 'a' ('al suelo') elicited a P600 effect compared to unmarked objects, consistent with previous literature. However, animate objects without the required prepositional case marker ('el obispo') only elicited an N400 effect compared to marked objects. This novel finding, an exclusive N400 modulation by a straightforward grammatical rule violation, does not follow from extant neurocognitive models of sentence processing, and mirrors unexpected ''semantic P600'' effects for thematically problematic sentences. These results may reflect animacy asymmetry in competition for argument prominence: following the article, thematic interpretation difficulties are elicited only by unexpectedly animate objects.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension

2013

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“…Agentivity is generally conceived of as the capacity to control a situation. Several notions such as volition, intention, sentience, instigation, causation, and action have been identified as properties of agentive participants (e.g., Dowty 1991, Lehmann 1991, Van Valin and Wilkins 1996, Van Valin and LaPolla 1997, Primus 2012. These notions emphasize different aspects related to agentive situations.…”

Section: Agentivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Scales or features in verb meaning?

Verhoeven

2017

BJL

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Several syntactic properties of verbal heads are accounted for through their semantic properties. Verbal features such as agentivity, volitionality, stativity etc. have been proven a useful tool for predicting several aspects of their syntactic behavior such as passivization, auxiliary selection etc. In the context of the empirical turn in current linguistics, the assumption of discrete features is questioned by studies based on corpora or speakers’ intuitions showing that the diagnostics of semantic features involve gradience. These findings are challenging for grammatical theory: are we justified to assume the existence of discrete verb classes or do the established properties indicate scalar dimensions of meaning? Based on two empirical studies – an acceptability study and a corpus study – the present article examines the role of agentivity in distinguishing verb classes and in predicting the syntactic behavior of verbs in German. Acceptability data show that the diagnostics of agentivity involve gradience, which cannot be reduced to random sources of variation. However, a comparison of scalar vs. categorical models of agentivity based on these diagnostics reveals that the syntactic variation in word order found in written corpus data is best accounted for through a model that assumes a binary division into a ±agentive and a non-agentive verb class.

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“…It is well-known that in most languages in which animacy is involved in DOM it is not only in an indexing way but also in a disambiguation way (de Swart, 2007;Malchukov, 2008;Primus, 2009). Thus, although we want to show that multidimensional DOM systems are more complex and varied than hitherto acknowledged, the reader should bear in mind that in reality the systems under discussion may be even more complex (see also Section 4).…”

Section: Multidimensional Dommentioning

confidence: 99%