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It takes two to kiss, but does it take three to give a kiss? Categorization based on thematic roles
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Language is characterised by broad and predictable mappings between meaning and syntactic form. Transitive sentences typically encode two-participant events while ditransitives typically encode three-participant events. Light-verb constructions, however, systematically violate these mappings; for example, some have ditransitive syntax (‘Romeo is giving Juliet a kiss’) but describe what appear to be agent–patient events (Romeo kissing Juliet). We used a conceptual sorting task to explore whether this non-canonical mapping influenced the interpretation of these sentences. Participants were trained to sort events by the number of thematic roles they encoded. After a training phase with only pictures, they sorted a mix of pictures and written sentences, including transitive agent–patient sentences, ditransitive source–theme–goal sentences and ditransitive light-verb constructions. Events described by light-verb constructions were most often grouped with agent–patient events but were sometimes grouped with source–theme–goal events. A control condition using the transitive/intransitive alternation for joint action verbs (e.g., ‘meet’) demonstrates that this is not attributable to misconstruing the task as syntactic sorting. We conclude that non-canonical mappings between meaning and form can affect event construal, but syntactic form does not solely determine the construal that is chosen.
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... Fausey and Boroditsky, 2010). However, the difference in expression affects, among other things, how strongly the action ('hug') is semantically incorporated into the predicate: In the simple verb to hug, the action is part of the verbal meaning; in the light verb construction to give a hug, the nominalized action 'a hug' is a syntactic object of the verb to give, which lends it a Theme-like flavor (Wittenberg and Snedeker, 2014;Wittenberg et al., 2017). ...
... Interestingly, however, we also found that nouns in light verb constructions pattern similarly to weak definites. This fits with other data on light verb constructions, which have been found to also fall in between categories in domains such as assignment of thematic roles (Wittenberg and Snedeker, 2014;Wittenberg et al., 2017.). ...
... Crucially, this is what weak definites have in common with light verb constructions and other noun incorporations: church-going, newspaper-reading, and kiss-giving all fall under a family of constructions that convey an activity periphrastically, while reducing the prototypicality of the thematic roles expressed. For instance, in going to church, 'church' is not a typical Goal, such as in going to Vienna; in giving a kiss, 'kiss' is not a typical Theme (Wittenberg and Snedeker, 2014;Wittenberg et al., 2017.) Thus, when comprehending a structure that contains a semantically incorporated noun, the discourse structure that is encoded in memory should be primarily that of the activity or event, with a lower resting activation of the noun. ...
The semantic incorporation of nouns into predicates, like give a hug, is not morphologically marked in English, and how syntactic incorporation strategies like light verb constructions influence the discourse-prominence structure of an utterance has not yet been studied systematically. One hypothesis is that since semantically incorporated nouns are not morphosyntactically incorporated in English, they can function like any other noun as prominent and accessible referents for anaphora. Another hypothesis is that their semantic status and their predicative meaning influence their discourse prominence, and hence their accessibility by anaphoric means. We tested these two hypotheses in two experimental studies on different anaphoric preferences of English pronouns. Our studies demonstrate that the felicity patterns for the two different pronominal reference strategies are determined at different linguistic levels: For it, we found an impact of morphosyntactic form; for that, the semantic type of the referent (object vs. event) seems to play a role. Crucially, the degree of semantic incorporation does not affect discourse prominence and pronoun choice to the extent that we had expected.
... The accept/reject responses to missing argument cases would be the crucial data. Unfortunately, psycholinguistic studies of argumenthood to date, which seem to be limited to Wittenberg and Snedeker (2013), Rissman, Rawlins and Landau (2015), have not used simple pattern recognition but rather have asked participants to quickly learn what a verb argument is and then to either classify phrases in presented sentences as arguments or nonarguments, or else to list all the arguments in presented sentences. This unnecessary complexity just introduces more noise into the data. ...
... On the present account, syntactic priming is just another form of identity priming. The ditransitive dative construction is a lexical item in LTM, and in this case it has not entirely returned to resting activation, so at the moment it is easier to reactivate than usual (Wittenberg and Snedeker 2014). This conception of WM processing offers a connection with probabilistic/predictive approaches to syntactic parsing (for syntax : Hale 2003: Hale , 2011Levy 2008;Kuperberg and Jaeger 2015;for morphology, O'Donnell 2015). ...
... For example, in, "She gave her son a kiss," there are two participants, and "kiss" describes the relationship between them. Using a conceptual sorting task, Wittenberg and Snedeker (2014) found evidence that people most often conceptualized sentences involving light verbs as having two meaningful semantic roles, as in agent-patient sentences (e.g., "The cowboy is taming the pony."). However, there was more variability among light-verb sentences, such that light verb sentences were sometimes conceptualized more like sentences containing three elements (e.g., "The boy is texting his friend a joke."). ...
In this article, we discuss multiple types of meaningful (semantic) relations underlying abstract (as compared to concrete) concepts. We adopt the viewpoint that words act as cues to meaning (Elman in Ment Lexicon 6(1):1–34, 2011; Lupyan and Lewis in Lang Cogn Neurosci 34(10):1319–1337, 2019), which is dependent on the dynamic contents of a comprehender’s mental model of the situation. This view foregrounds the importance of both linguistic and real-world context as individuals make sense of words, flexibly access relevant knowledge, and understand described events and situations. We discuss theories of, and experimental work on, abstract concepts through the lens of the importance of thematic and other semantic relations. We then tie these findings to the sentence processing literature in which such meaningful relations within sentential contexts are often experimentally manipulated. In this literature, some specific classes/types of abstract words have been studied, although not comprehensively, and with limited connection to the literature on knowledge underlying abstract concepts reviewed herein. We conclude by arguing that the ways in which humans understand relatively more abstract concepts, in particular, can be informed by the careful study of words presented not in isolation, but rather in situational and linguistic contexts, and as a function of individual differences in knowledge, goals, and beliefs.
... However, there is experimental evidence for co-composition in light verb constructions (again, on English). In Wittenberg and Snedeker (2014), participants were trained to categorize pictures of events according to number of thematic roles, for instance, sleeping children into a one-role category; monkeys eating bananas would be a two-role event; and a child giving an apple to a teaching would be a three-role event. In the test phase, participants also had to sort sentences containing light verb constructions containing the verb give (e.g., give a kiss/kick/hug…), base verbs (e.g., kiss/kick/hug…), or non-light constructions (e.g., give a flower/plate/ticket…). ...
Light verb constructions (e.g. give a sigh, take a walk) are a linguistic puzzle, as they consist of two predicating elements in a monoclausal structure. In the theoretical literature, there has been much interest in the linguistic analysis of such constructions across a range of grammatical frameworks. One such proposal is event co-composition, where the argument structures of noun and light verb merge, resulting in a composite argument structure, which has been claimed to be the source of increased processing costs in English and German. In contrast to these languages, in Hindi a larger proportion of the predicates are light verb constructions. Hence, we may ask whether a Hindi speaker's experience with light verb constructions allows them to go through the same co-composition operation faster than a speaker of English. Our results show that Hindi speakers are adept at the process of using light verb constructions to 'verbalize' predicates, more so than speakers of Germanic languages. We argue that these data provide evidence for a case of specific linguistic experiences shaping cognition: cost disappears with practice.
... What remains is at least the grid of thematic roles and its aspectual/aktionsart features. What there is beyond that is a question we will not try to resolve here, but we have begun to explore this issue in our ongoing work testing the conceptualization of light verb constructions as compared to non-light constructions (Wittenberg and Snedeker, 2013). ...
... ---FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE---Recent evidence suggest that adults do distinguish light from non-light constructions in terms of syntax-semantics mappings. In and Wittenberg & Snedeker (2014), adults were trained to categorize sentences based on the number of semantic roles conveyed. They treated non-light transitive verbs (e.g, "Grandma Kennison grew marijuana plants") as belonging to one category (i.e. 2 roles/arguments) and sentences with non-light ditransitive verbs ("The millionaire sells his friend a yacht") as belonging to another category (i.e. ...
In language acquisition, children assume that syntax and semantics reliably map onto each other, and they use these mappings to guide their inferences about novel word meanings: For instance, at the lexical level, nouns should name objects and verbs name events, and at the clausal level, syntactic arguments should match semantic roles. This review focuses on two cases where canonical mappings are broken—first, nouns that name event concepts (e.g., “a nap”) and second, light verb constructions that do not neatly map syntactic arguments onto semantic roles (e.g., “give a kiss”). We discuss the challenges involved in their acquisition, review evidence that suggests a close connection between them, and highlight outstanding questions.
Light verb constructions (e.g., give a kiss to somebody) syntactically reflect typical ditransitive structures (e.g., give a violin to somebody) yet it is not clear whether these two structures thematically similar as well. We tested Turkish-speaking adults on their construal of light verb constructions with respect to the number of thematic roles1 they perceive in the event structure in a rating study. The light verb give with a different noun phrase was used in all critical utterances (e.g., give a response or give an assignment). The noun phrases of these constructions denominalized either by -lA or - lAn+dIr morpheme (e.g., response-lA and assignment-lAn+dIr) were also used as control items. The study concluded that the light verbs with their noun phrase complements contribute to the semantic construal of the event structure and the thematic role assignment processes for the denominalized versions of these structures reflect this meaning construal.
Light verb constructions (LVCs) in English and Romance languages are somewhat unique crosslinguistically because LVCs in these languages tend to have semantically similar synthetic verb counterparts (Zarco 1999): e.g. make an appearance and appear . This runs contrary to assumptions in linguistic theories that two competing forms are rarely maintained in a language unless they serve distinct purposes (e.g. Grice 1975). Why do English LVCs exist alongside counterpart synthetic verbs, especially given that synthetic verbs are arguably the more efficient form (Zipf 1949)? It has been proposed that LVCs serve an aspectual function (Prince 1972, Live 1973, Wierzbicka 1982, Tanabe 1999, Butt & Geuder 2001), as there are telic LVC counterparts (e.g. have a thought ) of atelic verbs (e.g. think ). This proposal has been difficult to evaluate without a large-scale resource providing a markup of both LVCs and counterpart verbs. Addressing this gap in resources, the present research describes the development of guidelines for LVC annotation in the English PropBank (Bonial & Palmer 2015). The focus of this article is the subsequent analysis of these annotations, aimed at uncovering corpus evidence of what contexts call for the use of an LVC over a synthetic verb. The corpus study shows that the general function of LVCs is not an aspectual one and provides distributional evidence that the ease and variety with which LVCs can be modified is the general motivating factor for the use of an LVC.
What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub-predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles.
A central question within psycholinguistics is where sentences get their meaning. While it has been shown that phrasal constructions are readily associated with specific meanings, it remains unclear whether this meaning is accessed automatically, in the sense of being accessed quickly, and without reflection or explicit instruction. In this study, participants performed a lexical decision task on individual target words which were preceded by abstract skeletal constructions devoid of any meaningful open-class items. For example, an instance of a ditransitive prime was, He daxed her the norp. Three target words corresponded to the hypothesised meaning of each construction; that is, semantically congruent words for the English ditransitive were give, handed, and transferred. We found significant priming effects for congruent over incongruent target words, both for associated targets (which occur regularly within the construction: e.g., give and handed), and to a lesser extent, for target words that are semantically related to the construction but which rarely occur in the construction (e.g., transferred for the ditransitive).
While the referent of a nonreflexive pronoun clearly depends on context, the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. The present study seeks to characterise one representation that guides pronoun resolution. Our focus is an effect known as “implicit causality”. In causal dependant clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrast Sally frightened Mary because she … with Sally feared Mary because she…). A number of researchers have tried to explain and predict such biases with reference to semantic classes of verbs. However, such studies have focused on a small number of specially selected verbs. In Experiment 1, we find that existing taxonomies perform near chance at predicting pronoun-resolution bias on a large set of representative verbs. However, a more fine-grained taxonomy recently proposed in the linguistics literature does significantly better. In Experiment 2, we tested all 264 verbs in two of the narrowly defined verb classes from this new taxonomy, finding that pronoun-resolution biases were categorically different. These findings suggest that the semantic structure of verbs tightly constrains the interpretation of pronouns in causal sentences, raising challenges for theories which posit that implicit causality biases reflect world knowledge or arbitrary lexical features.
This is a revised and updated version of Butt (2003), which noted that the study of light verbs and complex predicates is fraught with dangers and misunderstandings that go beyond the merely terminological. This chapter thus attempts to provide some clarity by addressing how light verbs and complex predicates can be identified cross-linguistically, what the relationship between the two is and whether light verbs must always be associated with uniform syntactic and semantic properties. Based primarily on both diachronic and synchronic evidence from the South Asian language Urdu, but also by taking cross-linguistic patterns into account, this chapter attempts to pull together the relevant available knowledge in order to arrive at a more definitive understanding of light verbs. Jespersen (1965, Volume VI: 117) is generally credited with first coining the term light verb, which he applied to English V+NP constructions as in (I). (I) have a rest, a read, a cry, a think take a sneak, a drive, a walk, a plunge give a sigh, a shout, a shiver, a pull, a ring The intuition behind the term ‘light’ is that although these constructions respect the standard verb complement schema in English, the verbs take, give, etc., cannot be said to be predicating fully. That is, one does not actually physically ‘take’ a ‘plunge’ but rather one ‘plunges’. The verbs therefore seem to be more of a verbal licenser for nouns.
0. Introduction. The history of thematic roles (alternatively called 'case roles/relations' (Fillmore, 1968) and 'thematic relations' (Gruber, 1965)) in recent linguistic theory is one filled with varying conceptions of what these are, if indeed they exist at all. 1 They have at times been conceived of as purely syntactic objects (e.g. the 'theta roles' of Chomsky, 1981; the "case relations" of Fillmore, 1968), as names for parts of lexical/conceptual structure (e.g. Jackendoff, 1987), as purely semantic objects (Dowty, 1991; Parsons 1990, Carlson, 1984), or as epiphenomena (Ravin. 1990). The question of whether thematic roles are objects made reference to by a linguistic theory has been examined and re-examined with mixed results (Jackendoff (1972, 1987), Nishigauchi (1984), Dryer (1985), Bresnan (1982), Ladusaw and Dowty (1988), Ravin (1990)). This is perhaps not surprising since thematic roles would appear to be dispensable entities in the sense that it is easy to conceive of how to write a lexicon, a syntax, a morphology, a semantics, or a pragmatics without them. Still, the observations surrounding thematic roles are just tantalizing enough to take notice, and make one wonder what they might be. In this paper, I explore one possible answer to the question which moves them beyond the realm of linguistic theory. I am going to propose that we think of them as entities that play a conceptual role in the individuation of events. This paper, then, is an attempt to explore what kinds of results we get when we merge what have been to date two quite distinct concerns, the analysis of thematic roles in linguistics (though see Parsons, 1990), and issues about event individuation from philosophy.
What makes a liquid water? A strong version of "psychological essentialism" predicts that people use the presence or absence of H2O as the primary determinant of what liquids they call "water." To test this prediction, subjects were asked to judge the amount of H2O in liquids called "water" and liquids not called "water." Neither their beliefs about the simple presence/absence of H2O nor about the proportion of H2O in the liquids accounted well for which ones are normally called "water." Typicality ratings and an extended tree solution on similarity ratings suggested that use, location, and source of a liquid may also influence whether it is considered to be water. Sentence acceptability judgments further suggested that there may be a sense of "water" that corresponds to the strong essentialist view, but that there is also a more general sense in common use encompassing mixtures with varying amounts of H2O. These findings indicate that essentialist beliefs alone may not fully explain category membership judgments and word use, and they suggest a modified version of psychological essentialism.
Three experiments studied the acquisition of action-contingent events (action effects). In a first, acquisition phase participants performed free-choice reactions with each keypress leading to the presentation of either a particular category word (e.g., animal or furniture) or an exemplar word (e.g., dog or chair). In the test phase, choice responses were made to category or exemplar words by using a word-key mapping that was either compatible or incompatible with the key-word mapping during acquisition. Compatible mapping produced better performance than incompatible mapping if the words in the practice and the test phase were the same (e.g., animal M animal), if they had a subordinate-superordinate relationship (e.g., dog M animal), belonged to the same category (e.g., dog M cat), or referred to visually related concepts (e.g., orange M circle). The findings support the assumption that action effects are acquired and integrated with the accompanying action automatically, so that perceiving the effect leads to the priming of the associated response. And, most importantly, they demonstrate that effect acquisition generalizes to other, feature-overlapping events.
Activation processes appear to have an important impact on the mechanisms of language use, including those responsible for syntactic structure in speech. Some implications of this claim for theories of language performance were examined with a syntactic priming procedure. On each priming trial, subjects produced a priming sentence in one of several syntactic forms. They then viewed an unrelated event in a picture and described it in one sentence. The probability of a particular syntactic form being used in the description increased when that form had occurred in the prime, under presentation conditions that minimized subjects' attention to their speech, to the syntactic features of the priming sentences, and to connections between the priming sentences and the subsequent pictures. This syntactic repetition effect suggests that sentence formulation processes are somewhat inertial and subject to such probabilistic factors as the frequency or recency of use of particular structural forms. Two further experiments showed that this effect was not appreciably modified by variations in certain conceptual characteristics of sentences, and all three experiments found evidence that the effects of priming were specific to features of sentence form, independent of sentence content. The empirical isolability of structural features from conceptual characteristics of successive utterances is consistent with the assumption that some syntactic processes are organized into a functionally independent subsystem.