Abstract
Two eyetracking experiments examined the reading of sentences like "While the police/truck stopped the Datsun disappeared into the night." A paper by L. Stowe (Thematic structures and sentence comprehension. In G. N. Carlson and M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Linguistic structure in language processing, 1989) indicated that an inanimate subject ("truck" in "After the truck stopped the Datsun disappeared ...") is taken as theme of the ergative verb ("stop"), preventing the assignment of the postverbal noun phrase ("the Datsun") as direct object. This eliminates the disruption of reading that is normally observed on the disambiguating verb ("disappear"). The present experiments found the pattern of results reported by Stowe when looking at the disambiguating region of a sentence. However, the results for earlier regions suggest that the postverbal noun phrase was initially taken as direct object of an ergative verb even when the subject was inanimate. It appears that the inanimacy of the subject may not have guided the initial syntactic analysis, but rather facilitated the revision of an initial misanalysis.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
