Unaccusativity in Sentence Production

Abstract

Linguistic analyses suggest that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives, whose sole argument is a patient or theme (e.g., fall), and unergatives, whose sole argument is an agent (e.g., jump). 1 Past psycholinguistic experiments suggest that this distinction affects how sentences are processed: for example, it modulates both comprehension processes ( Bever and Sanz 1997 , Friedmann et al. 2008 ) and production processes ( Kegl 1995 , Kim 2006 , M. Lee and Thompson 2004 , J. Lee and Thompson 2011 , McAllister et al. 2009 ). Given this body of evidence, it is reasonable to assume, as we do here, that this distinction is directly relevant to psycholinguistic theorizing. However, especially in production, exactly how this distinction affects processing is unknown, beyond the suggestion that unaccusatives somehow involve more complex processing than unergatives (see J. Lee and Thompson 2011 ). Here we examine how real-time planning processes in production differ for unaccusatives and unergatives. We build on previous studies on lookahead effects in sentence planning that show that verbs are planned before a deep object is uttered but not before a deep subject is uttered ( Momma, Slevc, and Phillips 2015 , 2016 ). (We use terms like deep subject in a theory-neutral fashion, with no intended commitment to a specific syntactic encoding.) This line of research sheds light on the broader issue of how the theory of argument structure relates to sentence production.

The Role of Verbs in Sentence Production

“…Lee and Thompson, 2011;Momma et al, 2016Momma et al, , 2017Momma et al, , 2018, some of this research also finds that typical subjects (i.e., those in transitive and unergative sentences) do not. In particular, Momma et al (2016Momma et al ( , 2018. have found that the time it takes to start uttering a sentence increases when there is semantic interference affecting the verb, but this only happens for sentences where the DO precedes the verb (in Japanese; Momma et al, 2016), or when the subject is semantically more related to a DO than to a typical subject (i.e., for English unaccusatives; Momma et al, 2018) 2 , but not when the first constituent in the sentence is a typical sentence subject.…”

“…Additionally, while some authors have found that the verb's internal arguments [i.e., direct objects (DOs) and subjects of unaccusative verbs] depend on verb retrieval for their processing (J. Lee and Thompson, 2011;Momma et al, 2016Momma et al, , 2017Momma et al, , 2018, some of this research also finds that typical subjects (i.e., those in transitive and unergative sentences) do not. In particular, Momma et al (2016Momma et al ( , 2018.…”

“…This may explain why much of the evidence for linear incrementality concerns optional constituents such as adjectives and prepositional modifiers of a noun (Brown-Schmidt and Konopka, 2008Zhao and Yang, 2016), while research on full sentences has tended to support a more hierarchical incrementality where the processing of certain constituents does seem to depend on the processing of later ones with which they are structurally related (J. Lee and Thompson, 2011;Momma et al, 2016Momma et al, , 2018Kidd et al, 2018).…”

“…In particular, Momma et al (2016Momma et al ( , 2018. have found that the time it takes to start uttering a sentence increases when there is semantic interference affecting the verb, but this only happens for sentences where the DO precedes the verb (in Japanese; Momma et al, 2016), or when the subject is semantically more related to a DO than to a typical subject (i.e., for English unaccusatives; Momma et al, 2018) 2 , but not when the first constituent in the sentence is a typical sentence subject. This difference between the reliance on verb access of the two types of verbal arguments could be explained by the closer relationship between verbs and their internal arguments (i.e., DOs) than between verbs an their external arguments (i.e., subjects of accusatives and unergatives; Kratzer, 1996), but it puts into question the notion that verbs are always necessary for overall sentence processing.…”

What can wh-questions tell us about real-time language production: Evidence from English and Mandarin

“…Prior work in production has tended to focus on declarative, transitive sentences in English, where the subject of the sentence is also the linearly initial argument (cf. Momma et al, 2018). The current work uses English object wh-questions, where the object linearly precedes the subject (e.g.…”