Abstract
The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) has been extensively studied in linguistics, but, to date, it has not been tested by means of ERPs. The present study aimed to experimentally test the UH hypothesis in Basque and determine what the electrophysiological correlates are of the processing of unergative versus unaccusative predicates; it also aimed to investigate distinctness in phi-feature processing. We generated eight conditions to compare unergative and unaccusative predicate sentence processing involving phi-feature violations in grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Participants responded faster to sentences containing unaccusative predicates compared to unergative predicates. All conditions elicited a N400-P600 interaction. Overall, the negativity elicited by person violations was larger than the negativity elicited by number violations in both types of predicates. Intransitives differed regarding the size of the positivity elicited by phi-feature violations: unaccusatives elicited a larger positivity for number than for person feature violations, but unergatives elicited a larger positivity for person than for number.
Highlights
Perlmutter (1978) put forth the Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH), claiming there are two different types of intransitive predicates: unaccusatives, with a theme theta role, and unergatives, with an agent theta role (Perlmutter 1978)
Our study provides behavioural and electrophysiological evidence in support of the Unaccusative Hypothesis and the Feature Separability Hypothesis
We found that participants were faster processing sentences with unaccusative verbs than sentences with unergative verb
Summary
Perlmutter (1978) put forth the Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH), claiming there are two different types of intransitive predicates: unaccusatives, with a theme theta role, and unergatives, with an agent theta role (Perlmutter 1978). The UH makes two claims: (i) there are two different types of argument structure involved in intransitive predicates, one has an agent as the sole argument of the verb and the other one has a theme as the sole argument of the verb (unaccusatives) and (ii) the syntactic derivation of unaccusatives involves one more step than that of unergatives, namely the promotion of the theme argument from object to subject. Bever & Sanz (1997) were the first to experimentally test the UH; they conducted a reaction time study in Spanish to explore whether the trace left by the argument of unaccusative verbs in the complement of V position, argued to be an anaphor (Chomsky 1981), would prime semantically related nouns as overt anaphors do
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