Semantic/pragmatic factors affecting the salience of transfer verb arguments

Meghan Salomon,Gregory Ward

doi:10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4042

Abstract

Rohde et al. (2006) showed that, for transfer verbs, the salience of the recipient argument is a function of the particular coherence relation posited by participants. Using a priming paradigm with transfer verbs and occupation-denoting NPs in isolated sentences, we find that participants are sensitive to the lexical properties of the transfer verb itself as measured by the relative salience of the associated transfer verb arguments. Alternatively, using a sentence completion paradigm—a more strategic task in which participants are guided by discourse-level features—we find participants are sensitive instead to the coherence relations of the relevant event, replicating Rohde et al. (2006). Our findings support the notion that coherence relations drive the interpretation of multi-sentence discourses while sentences considered in isolation are guided by particular features of the linguistic context.

Highlights

Language is a fundamental tool that people use to communicate and glean meanings, some of which are explicitly conveyed while others of which are only conveyed implicitly (Bolinger 1968; Grice 1970; Whorf 1956)
After being presented with a sentence containing a non-ToP verb, participants produced significantly more continuations related to the AGENT role (M=0.59) than they did to the PATIENT (M=0.24) role (t(3406)=22.05, p
In the absence of multi-sentence discourses, where the establishment of a coherence relation is not at issue, what can we expect to find? To answer this question, we conducted a series of lexical decision studies, presenting participants with single sentences and measuring their reaction times to lexical associates of the SOURCE and RECIPIENT roles under various conditions

Summary

Introduction

Language is a fundamental tool that people use to communicate and glean meanings, some of which are explicitly conveyed while others of which are only conveyed implicitly (Bolinger 1968; Grice 1970; Whorf 1956). Within research on sentence comprehension and text processing, various studies across various frameworks have shown that people rely on a remarkable range of semantic features to make predictions about an unfolding discourse (Graesser, Singer, and Trabasso 1994; Kintsch 1994; Kintsch and Van Dijk 1978). One such feature has to do with the argument structure of verbs and their corresponding thematic roles. With other verb classes with different argument structures, we find a different assignment of salience.

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