Comparing the roles of referents and event structures in parsing preferences

Abstract

Recent work has shown that potentially reciprocal verbs are interpreted reciprocally when their subjects are complex reference objects (plural referents that incorporate multiple referents), but transitively when their subjects are undifferentiated plural sets. Four self-paced reading experiments investigated why this is the case. The experiments contrasted the hypothesis that the parser's behaviour is driven by the complexity or specificity of potential event structures with the hypothesis that what matters is simply the availability of multiple referents. First we replicated Patson & Ferreira's Experiment 1 with self-paced reading, and then in three studies we manipulated the conjuncts within a conjoined noun phrase (NP) subject (e.g. the men and the women vs. the man and the women) in order to vary event structures. The results indicated that potentially reciprocal verbs were interpreted as reciprocal with any conjoined subject, regardless of what type of NPs comprised it. This suggests that the parser is sensitive specifically to the presence of referents, not to the relative complexity or specificity of the event structure that could be built based on those referents. These findings are consistent with Patson and Ferreira's hypothesis that available referents matter because they immediately saturate the thematic roles of reciprocal verbs.