Why can you hit someone on the arm but not break someone on the arm?—a neuropsychological investigation of the English body-part possessor ascension construction

Abstract

Recent developments in linguistic theory suggest that many grammatical constructions (e.g. datives, passives, locatives, resultatives, etc.) impose semantic restrictions on which verbs can occur in them. This has led to the ‘grammatically relevant semantic subsystem hypothesis’, which maintains that features of meaning that determine the interaction between verbs and constructions are segregated from other features of meaning that are irrelevant to grammar. This paper focuses on the English body-part possessor ascension construction—e.g. Sam hit Bill on the arm vs. ∗ Sam broke Bill on the arm. Previous research suggests that only verbs that include the general notion of ‘contact’ as an invariant part of their semantic structure can occur in this construction; other idiosyncratic features of verb meaning, such as the specific types of contact encoded by tap, slap, and pat, are effectively invisible to the construction. In a series of experiments, two brain-damaged patients with left perisylvian lesions (out of a total of five tested) manifested the following dissociation: they passed a verb–picture matching test that required them to discriminate between subtle aspects of verb meaning that are irrelevant to the construction, but they failed a grammaticality judgment test that required them to determine whether the same verbs satisfy the semantic conditions of the construction. Their poor performance on the judgment test could not be attributed to a purely syntactic impairment, since they had no trouble with a separate test that evaluated their knowledge of the basic syntactic structure of the construction. Overall, the results suggest that the patients have a disorder that selectively affects their appreciation of grammatically relevant aspects of meaning.