Thematic role assignment in non-default verb classes: A cross-linguistic comparison of English and German

Louise Kyriaki,Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky,Matthias Schlesewsky

doi:10.16995/glossa.5728

Abstract

The influence of sentential cues (such as animacy and word order) on thematic role interpretation differs as a function of language (MacWhinney et al. 1984). However, existing cross-linguistic research has typically focused on transitive sentences involving agents, and interpretation of non-default verb classes is less well understood. Here, we compared the way in which English and German native speakers – languages known to differ in the cue prominence of animacy and word order – assign thematic roles. We compared their interpretation of sentences containing either default (agent-subject) or non-default (experiencer-subject) verb classes. Animacy of the two noun phrases in a sentence was either animate-inanimate and plausible (e.g. “The men will devour the meals...”) or inanimate-animate and implausible in English (e.g. “The meals will devour the men...”). We examined role assignment by probing for either the actor or undergoer of the sentence. Mixed effects modelling revealed that role assignment was significantly influenced by noun animacy, verb class, question type, and language. Results are interpreted within the Competition Model framework (Bates et al. 1982; MacWhinney et al. 1984) and show that English speakers predominantly relied on word order for thematic role assignment. German speakers relied on word order to a comparatively lesser degree, with animacy a prominent cue. Cue weightings appeared to be modulated in the context of other cues, with the weighting of an animacy-based strategy over a word-order-based strategy increasing for sentences with non- default (experiencer-subject) verbs and with undergoer-focused questions, particularly where word order was more flexible (i.e. in German as opposed to English). These findings highlight the differential influence of the surrounding context (e.g. question focus) across languages.

Highlights

Psycholinguistic studies of cross-linguistic sentence comprehension have predominantly examined a narrow range of sentence constructions
We aimed to address these gaps in our knowledge of cue use for sentence comprehension by comparing comprehension strategies in default configurations with configurations differing mildly from the default
At the time of the study, all participants were currently residing in Australia, but German speakers had resided within a German-speaking country within the past two years

Summary

Introduction

Psycholinguistic studies of cross-linguistic sentence comprehension have predominantly examined a narrow range of sentence constructions While this allows for effective comparison between languages, current findings are almost exclusively focused on default verb classes (agentsubject, default case marking). Seminal crosslinguistic work within the context of the Competition Model (CM; Bates et al 1982) involved presenting native speakers with simple transitive sentences containing two concrete nouns and a transitive action verb, followed by a prompt to identify the actor/subject (Bates & MacWhinney 1989) Such experiments allowed for the classification of the syntactic and semantic cues that enable speakers to identify thematic roles, including word order, agreement, animacy, and stress (MacWhinney et al 1984). Recent neurolinguistic work shows qualitative differences in the brain’s comprehension strategy depending on the dominant cue of the language being comprehended (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al 2011; BornkesselSchlesewsky & Schlesewsky 2020)

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