Grammatical Object Research Articles

Argument structure affects relative clause extraposition: corpus evidence from Persian

The extraposition of a relative clause creates a discontinuous dependency between the relative clause and its host noun phrase, as in A man just entered the bank who claimed to have a gun. Since discontinuous dependencies are known to increase processing effort, a key question is why speakers produce them in the first place. Some factors known to affect extraposition – for example, the length of the relative clause and the main verb phrase – have received processing-based explanations, but others haven’t. We focus on two factors described by previous research: verb type and the grammatical function of the noun phrase hosting the relative clause. Specifically, extraposition from grammatical subjects is more common with unaccusative and passive verbs in English; further, extraposition is more common from grammatical objects than subjects in Dutch and German. We replicate these findings using corpus data from Persian. Further, we propose that verb type and grammatical function can be linked to a single underlying notion: argument structure. We demonstrate that argument structure modulates the likelihood of extraposition in Persian. We suggest that this occurs because speakers choose to extrapose relative clauses in order to keep the main clause verb close to its internal arguments. This explanation extends previous findings in psycholinguistics on the role of argument structure in speech planning during language production.

Grammatical Object Passives in Yucatec Spanish

Yucatec Spanish displays a type of sentence that appears to mix elements of an active impersonal and a passive. For example, “te castigaron por mi tío” may be interpreted as “you were punished by my uncle”, where a by-phrase headed by the preposition por introduces an agent rather than a cause or reason. The verb has active morphology—it is always third-person plural, and accusative clitics (e.g., te) and DOM-marked objects are possible. This type of sentence, which I descriptively label an active–passive (A-P) hybrid, has been mentioned in previous literature on contact varieties in Mayan-speaking regions of Mexico and Guatemala, but it has not been precisely described or analyzed formally. I argue that A-P hybrid constructions are instances of grammatical object passives. Grammatical object passives have certain active properties—accusative case is assigned to a theme argument and the morphology of the verb is active, but like passives, they require that the expression of the agent be a by-phrase rather than a grammatical subject. I claim that this is possible in this variety of Spanish due to the emergence of a null pronoun, absent in other varieties of Spanish, that can merge in the specifier of Voice and restrict, rather than saturate, an agent argument, permitting the subsequent addition of a third-person by-phrase. I demonstrate that this analysis is able to explain its hybrid properties as well as other person restrictions on the by-phrases that express the agent. Finally, I describe avenues of future research that will help discern the role that language contact may have played in the emergence of A-P hybrids.

Anticipatory Processing in a Verb-Initial Mayan Language: Eye-Tracking Evidence During Sentence Comprehension in Tseltal.

We present a visual world eye-tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive sentences in Tseltal is Verb-Object-Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information available at the outset, which should facilitate anticipation of the post-verbal arguments. Tseltal speakers listened to verb-initial sentences with either an object-predictive verb (e.g., "eat") or a general verb (e.g., "look for") (e.g., "Ya slo'/sle ta stukel on te kereme," Is eating/is looking (for) by himself the avocado the boy/ "The boy is eating/is looking (for) an avocado by himself") while seeing a visual display showing one potential referent (e.g., avocado) and three distractors (e.g., bag, toy car, coffee grinder). We manipulated verb type (predictive vs. general) and recorded participants' eye movements while they listened and inspected the visual scene. Participants' fixations to the target referent were analyzed using multilevel logistic regression models. Shortly after hearing the predictive verb, participants fixated the target object before it was mentioned. In contrast, when the verb was general, fixations to the target only started to increase once the object was heard. Our results suggest that Tseltal hearers pre-activate semantic features of the grammatical object prior to its linguistic expression. This provides evidence from a verb-initial language for online incremental semantic interpretation and anticipatory processing during language comprehension. These processes are comparable to the ones identified in subject-initial languages, which is consistent with the notion that different languages follow similar universal processing principles.

Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction

Abstract This article aims to analyze the Korean internally headed relative clause (IHRC) construction from a Cognitive Grammar perspective. The primary issue concerning the Korean IHRC construction is the mismatch between the syntactic object and the semantic head. While the whole embedded clause headed by kes functions as a grammatical object, the semantic head may acquire the object status. I demonstrate that the mismatch is nothing but a metonymic process, just like the mismatch we observe in the loon in the water; even when only the loon’s feet are in the water, the expression is felicitously understood without identifying the particular portion of the loon under water. Just like the speaker accesses the loon’s feet through the loon, she accesses the semantic head through the reified embedded clause in the IHRC construction. I show that adopting this general human cognitive process helps us reach a broader generalization and sheds new light on hitherto neglected examples.

Experiential Attitudes are Propositional

Attitudinal propositionalism is the view that all mental attitude content is truth-evaluable. While attitudinal propositionalism is still silently assumed in large parts of analytic philosophy, recent work on objectual attitudes (i.e. attitudes like ‘fearing Moriarty’ and ‘imagining a unicorn’ that are reported through intensional transitive verbs with a direct object) has put attitudinal propositionalism under explanatory pressure. This paper defends propositionalism for a special subclass of objectual attitudes, viz. experiential attitudes. The latter are attitudes like seeing, remembering, and imagining whose grammatical objects intuitively denote (events or) scenes. I provide a propositional analysis of experiential attitudes that preserves the merits of propositionalism. This analysis uses the possibility of representing the target-scenes of experiential attitudes by the intersection of all propositions that are true in these scenes. I show that this analysis makes available the usual (Russellian) account of intensionality and the common (Boolean) logic for entailments.

How we say what we do and why it is important: An idiosyncratic analysis of mental health nursing identity on social media.

This paper is the culmination of a qualitative research project into mental health nursing (MHN) identity via exploration of a social media campaign organized in 2018 by the UK Mental Health Nurses Association. Through engagement with this campaign and a multimethod approach, this paper proposes a new and novel heuristic framework for exploring MHN identity holistically, through what is termed the 6Ps of MHN identity. The 6Ps – encompassing the professional, personal, practical, proximal, philosophical, and political aspects of identity – were previously shared with members of the MHN research community at both the 2019 and 2020 proceedings of the International Mental Health Nursing Research Conference. To examine the identity expressed in the social media campaign, all contributions by nurses were amalgamated into one ‘text’ for analysis. When this text was examined, the focus was the particular language used by MHNs. This granular analysis concentrated on word choice, form, and frequency as the constituent aspects of meaning. Even when it was necessary to examine larger grammatical units, the key nouns – grammatical objects and subjects – were the primary focus of analysis. Following this, the author – a mental health nurse themselves – applied their personal understanding of the field of practice to the text to arrive at an understanding of its contents. This approach is the first in the field of MHN identity research to examine the profession’s identity as expressed by members on social media, as well as the linguistic form of that expression.

The Impact of Information Structure on the Emergence of Differential Object Marking: An Experimental Study.

Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological cases. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking objects that might otherwise be mistaken for subjects (e.g., animate objects). While some recent experimental work supports this account, research on language typology suggests at least one alternative hypothesis. In particular, DOM may instead arise as a way of marking objects that are atypical from the point of view of information structure. According to this account, rather than being marked to avoid ambiguity, objects are marked when they are given (already familiar in the discourse) rather than new. Here, we experimentally investigate this hypothesis using two artificial language learning experiments. We find that information structure impacts participants’ object marking, but in an indirect way: atypical information structure leads to a change in word order, which then triggers increased object marking. Interestingly, this staged process of change is compatible with documented cases of DOM emergence. We argue that this process is driven by two cognitive tendencies. First, a tendency to place discourse given information before new information, and second, a tendency to mark noncanonical word order. Taken together, our findings provide corroborating evidence for the role of information structure in the emergence of DOM systems.

The Done‐State Derived Stative: A Case Study in Building Complex Eventualities in Syntax

AbstractA basic question for theories of the syntax–semantics interface is whether the relationship between the form and meaning of complex aspectual expressions is mediated by the pieces that make up hierarchical syntax or whether complex forms and their meanings can pair directly, in templatic or constructional representations, for example. This paper examines the string I’m done writing chapter 3 with this issue in mind. The (be) done V‐ing structure does not seem to have been analyzed before, and I refer to it as the done state. The done state expresses a complex stative eventuality. Notably, the transitive object of the done state can hold a target state, an unexpected interpretation given the ‐ing verb (contrast I’ve been writing chapter 3). Apparent form–meaning mismatches of this type are regularly taken as evidence for listed, constructional mappings. I show, however, that the done state has the syntactic pieces of a stative passive of a present participle, and I argue that the done state is a previously unnoticed type of derived stative. The analysis provides a compositional account of the structure’s semantics and morphology. I further argue that the syntactic items that make up the done state have the same properties that they have elsewhere in the grammar; there is no need to postulate new grammatical objects. The predictable properties of the done state find explanation in models in which complex eventualities are built up out of the minimal units that make up complex phrases.

Prescriptive Discourse and Grammatical Objects. Their Treatment from the Standpoint of Glottopolitics

En el proceso de estandarización de las lenguas, la descripción ha tenido tradicionalmente una dimensión prescriptiva. Esta se ha explicitado en enunciados que censuran determinados usos y postulan cuáles son los correctos. Las gramáticas, fundamentalmente, han participado en ello. Pero, también, los instrumentos lingüísticos que se inscriben en la tradición retórica (como manuales de estilo periodístico, artes de escribir o guías de lenguaje no sexista) han prescripto, con el objetivo de incidir en la producción discursiva, sobre las formas gramaticales más adecuadas para ciertos espacios sociales o para resolver determinadas problemáticas. En el artículo, abordamos, en primer lugar, la relación de los discursos prescriptivos con la determinación de las jerarquías sociales, el lugar de autoridad que construyen y los juicios en los que se apoyan. Luego, nos centraremos en la prescripción acerca de unidades gramaticales en dos tipos actuales de instrumentos reguladores de la discursividad: los simplificadores y uniformizadores y los antidiscriminadores. Adoptamos la perspectiva glotopolítica, que se interesa por los modos de intervención sobre el lenguaje y sobre la distribución social de la palabra e ilustramos con textos producidos en el mundo hispánico en diferentes épocas.

Variable embedded agent in Sason Arabic

The paper investigates the syntax and semantics of an indirect causative construction, ‘make’ causatives, in Sason Arabic with a focus on the syntax of the embedded structure and the status of the implicit embedded agent. On the basis of several diagnostics, the study demonstrates that ‘make’ embeds an agentive VoiceP, which also manifests an active-passive alternation despite the absence of any morphological reflex. Regarding the nature of the implicit embedded agent, the paper argues that it is present as a free variableà laHeim (1982) generated on the Voice head itself. In so doing, it adds to the ontology of null arguments as well as suggesting that licensing of a grammatical object is dissociated from the projection of a specifier.

Quantification in grammar: Ideas of I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay in the context of modern linguistic research

The article is devoted to the problem of field structuring of grammatical objects. The study focuses on the field organization of parts of speech in Russian. From the point of view of goal-setting, the study is focused on solving two main tasks: 1) to prove the connection between modern ideas about the internal organization of parts of speech with the interpretation of I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay of the category of quantitativeness in language, 2) to present his understanding of the field organization of substantives. The following research methods were used as the main ones: descriptive-analytical, morphological analysis of grammatical forms, the method of field structuring. The material for the study was the subject lexemes available in the Russian language, as well as extracts from the National Corpus of the Russian Language. It is shown that the study of grammar objects from the standpoint of field structuring is poorly developed, as evidenced by unresolved or ambiguously interpreted questions.

Compositional trace conversion

In order to eliminate traces as stipulated grammatical objects, syntactic movement has been reformulated in terms of multiple-merge : it is the result of the same constituent being merged into the structure multiple times, using either copies or multidominance structures . In spite of their empirical and conceptual advantages, multiple-merge theories pose known challenges for the semantic interpretation of movement, as there are no variable-denoting traces in lower positions. The most common means of resolving this conundrum is trace conversion (Fox 2002, 2003), in which either a syntactic operation makes alterations at lower merge sites in order to generate trace-like interpretations, or the semantics behaves as if such a syntactic operation had occurred. In this paper I discuss problems faced by presently formulated versions of trace conversion and propose an alternative, compositional trace conversion , in which multiple-merge structures can be directly interpreted in a straightforwardly compositional manner. This approach is shown to generalize well, extending to modals and degree phrases as well as DPs. EARLY ACCESS

Reflections on teaching devices articulating grammar and text

Over and above the theoretical questions it raises, the interaction between grammar and text is a particularly open problem, constituting a real challenge for language teaching and teacher training. In this article, we will first examine the origins and characteristics of this problem, as it emerged several decades ago and as it appears today in the cantons of French-speaking Switzerland. We will then examine theoretical and pedagogical conceptions of the status of grammars and texts, and present the goals of grammar teaching so as to understand how the teaching problem that articulates grammar and texts is anchored in it. Then we will describe elements of a research program on this type of articulation which we are conducting in French-speaking Switzerland with the GRAFE'MAIRE group. This program, called 'Principles of a fundamental didactics of grammar', is particularly focused on the function of noun phrase complements and the values of past tenses. The experimental part of our research is ongoing, but as we will indicate in the conclusion, preparatory analyses of these experiments have revealed the need for a serious re-examination of the very status of these grammatical objects, and the efficient pedagogical approaches they require.

Production Before Comprehension in the Emergence of Transitive Constructions in Dutch Child Language.

Although 2-year-old English- or Dutch-speaking children tend to use correct subject-object word order in their own utterances, they appear to make a substantial number of word order errors in their comprehension of other people’s utterances. This pattern of adult-like production but poor comprehension is challenging for linguistic theory. While most approaches to language acquisition explain this pattern from extra-linguistic factors such as task demands, the constraint-based approach Optimality Theory predicts this asymmetry between production and comprehension to arise as a result of the linguistic competition between constraints on word order and animacy. This study tests this prediction by investigating how children’s comprehension and production of word order in transitive constructions develop, and to what degree their comprehension and production are influenced by animacy. Two- and three-year-old Dutch speaking children (n = 32) and adult controls (n = 41) were tested on their comprehension and production of simple transitive sentences, in which the animacy of the grammatical subject and object were manipulated. Comprehension was tested in a picture selection task and a preferential looking task, and production was tested in a parallel sentence elicitation task. Children’s comprehension of transitive sentences in the picture selection task was found to be less accurate than their production of the same sentences in the sentence elicitation task. Their eye gaze in the minimally demanding preferential looking task did not reveal a more advanced understanding of these sentences. In comprehension, children’s response accuracy, and to a lesser extent their eye gaze, was influenced by the animacy of subject and object, providing evidence that their poor comprehension is due to the competition between word order and animacy, as predicted by the constraint-based approach. In contrast, animacy may have a facilitating effect on children’s production of transitive sentences. These findings suggest that the mature form and meaning of a transitive construction are not acquired together. Rather, the form-meaning pairings of transitive constructions seem to arise gradually as the by-product of acquiring the constraint ranking of the grammar. This leads to the gradual alignment of forms and meanings in child language and hence to the emergence of linguistic constructions.

Influence of Sociolinguistic Factors on Grammatical Competence of Lithuanian Used by Students Enrolled in Russian Gymnasiums

This article investigates the influence of sociolinguistic factors on the Lithuanian language grammatical competence of 11th grade (3rd gymnasium grade) students enrolled in Russian gymnasiums. The data of the study were collected in four high schools in Vilnius, where the language of instruction is Russian. 179 students participated in the study. To measure the grammatical competence of object marking in the Lithuanian language the Elicited Oral Imitation Test (Erlam 2006) and the task of narrative writing were used. A sociolinguistic questionnaire focused on the age of onset of Lithuanian and the linguistic behavior of students. The data were analyzed with R (R Core Team, 2013). Linear mixed effects models (LMM) were used to explore the relationship between sociolinguistic factors and students’ grammatical competence of the Lithuanian language. The results of LMM revealed that the students’ age of onset of Lithuanian affected their correctness in marking grammatical objects in Lithuanian. Students, who learned Lithuanian before the age of 4 performed better in the tasks than students who learned the language at the age of 6 or later. A strong positive correlation between the semestral grade of the Lithuanian language and literature at schools and students’ grammatical competence was also noticed. However, almost no factors of students’ linguistic behavior were significant in the analysis.

Порівняння в художньому мовленні турецьких письменників ХХ сторіччя

The paper deals with comparison constructions of the Turkish language on the base of works of fiction of Turkish writers of the 20th century. Reflecting figurative (simile) and non-figurative (correlation between qualitative and quantitative characteristics of two objects) collation of two or more objects comparisons in the Turkish language are examined from the lexico-semantic point of view and though their syntactic role in the sentence. Comparison remains a relevant and interesting topic of research despite the large number of works. It is a mean, a way of investigation and knowing of reality when unknown object is collated with the well-known one. Comparison may be represented as an act and a result at once. As the act of knowing reality comparison, represents such stages of exploration of the real world as identification of an object, its correlation with already known categories and groups of objects, definition of common features and juxtaposition of their intensity for further classification of the object explored. While resembling the result of act of cognition comparison demonstrates the degree of manifestation of a particular feature on a scale from complete identity to absolute difference. As an act of logical operation comparison consists of four elements, having different nominations in research works, they resemble object that is compared, object to which something is compared with, ground of comparison (some common feature for both objects) and result of comparison that describes identity, resemblance or distinctions between objects. Since logical operations of world’s investigation find reflection in language as a linguistic category comparison also has four elements in its structure. According to the lexico-semantic group of object and subject of comparison, Turkish comparisons may be divided on such groups as human-human, human-animal, nature-human. Comparisons are mostly used to express nature, human’s appearance or character, size of items, to make some estimation, to describe the way something is happening like or to resemble someone’s condition. Turkish works of fiction use both figurative comparison (simile) and non-figurative comparison. The syntactic role of comparison in a sentence depends on which member of the sentence the comparative part of the comparative construction belongs to. Mostly, comparisons act as attribute or adverbial modifier of manner, but also may act as predicate or grammatical object.

On the Problem of Subject Identity in the ‘Adverbial Participle + Main Clause’ Construction in Modern Russian

The article discusses the subject matching between the adverbial participle construction and the main clause in Russian. Russian normative grammar requires the main clause and the adverbial participle construction within one utterance to express an action or a state of one and the same subject, as the Russian деепричастие (adverbial participle)= is typologically related to an implicit-subject converb. The adverbial participle has developed from a copredicative participle, and now it mostly expresses a subordinate action (or a subordinate state) of the main clause's subject, which has the form of the nominative case. But, according to numerous real language examples, both oral and written, the grammatical subject (if any) in the main clause does not always coincide with the semantic subject of the whole situation. Besides, there are cases when the subjects of the main clause and the adverbial participle construction are different. There exists a wider sphere of semantic and pragmatic relations between participants of the main situation and of the subordinate situation, where the communicative subject, and not the formal one, plays the main role. Several main types of constructions are analysed, in which the semantic and communicative subject, while being the same for both situations, is not expressed by means of the nominative case in the main clause. First, the semantic subject may have the form of the dative case, and that is sometimes = omitted when the subject is clear from the context: Uvidev (see-ADVP.PST) zadaniia, mne (I-DAT) stalo boiazno ‘After seeing the tasks, I became frightened’, Sidia v netoplenoi kvartire, bylo holodno ‘While sitting in the unheated apartment, I (we, etc.) was (were) cold’. Second, there can occur passivisation of the main clause: Vsio eto bylo sdelano (PASS), pod’ezzhaia (approach-ADVP.PRES) k derevne ‘All of this was done (by the author of the sentence) when he was approaching the village’. Third, the semantic subject may be expressed by different possessive constructions: Zakanchivaia (finish-ADVP.PRES) stat’iu, u menia (I-GEN) slomalsia komp’iuter ‘While I was finishing an article, my computer broke down’. The fourth case is represented by the removal of the subject, which is implicit in the given situation: Potrativ (spend-ADVP.PST) vsio na vypivku, na edu ne ostalos ‘Having spent all his/her/our etc. money on booze, nothing was left for food’. In addition, two rare types of using the adverbial participle construction are analysed: 1) when the latter neither morphologically nor semantically relates to the subject of the main clause: Rebionok gladil sobaku, viliaia (wag-ADVP.PRES) hvostom ‘The child caressed the dog (which was) wagging its tail’; 2) when the construction relates to the grammatical object of the main clause: Pozdravliaiu vas, grazhdanin, sovramshi (lie-ADVP.PST) ‘My congratulations, comrade: you’ve just lied!’. While focusing on Russian utterances, the paper also includes data from other Slavic (including ancient) and, in several cases, from Baltic languages. Comparison shows that the given phenomena are not specific to Russian. Besides, the comparative data helps us to avoid deducing some modern structural phenomena directly from older constructions. For example, there seems to be no reason to connect such structures as Rebionok gladil sobaku, viliaia (wag-ADVP.PRES) hvostom ‘The child caressed the dog (which was) wagging its tail’ directly to the absolute predicative use of participles in Old Russian. We come to the conclusion that the lack of formal and grammatical congruence (in other words, of categorial agreement) between the adverbial participle construction and the main clause is the reason why in modern Russian the adverbial participle construction is able to disconnect from the grammatical subject of the main clause. Therefore, the adverbial participle construction can now be used in any situation when the speaker has a communicative intention to designate a subordinate action and the subject of this action is clear from the context.

Categorization of Korean Double Accusative Constructions

The current study has reviewed Korean double accusative constructions (DACs), which refer to constructions where two NPs marked with -(l)ul appear at the same time in a sentence. It gives rise to questions about which one is a grammatical object and what the other NP is in a sentence. To solve these questions, we have classified DACs into four types according to syntactic and semantic/pragmatic perspectives. There are four types of DACs: NP2 as a grammatical object, NP1 as a focus or topic; NP2 as a grammatical object, NP1 as a topic; NP1 as a grammatical object, NP2 as a modifier; NP1 as a grammatical object, NP2 as a part of the predicate. That is, in the first two types, NP2 is a grammatical object, while in the other two types, NP1 is a grammatical object. Additionally, the NP, which is not a grammatical object in the first three types, can be left out from a sentence, whereas it is obligatory in the last type. (Kyungwoon University · Kyungpook National University)

An Evaluation Of A Linguistically Motivated Conversational Software Agent Framework

<p>This paper presents a critical evaluation framework for a linguistically motivated conversational software agent (CSA). The CSA prototype investigates the integration, intersection and interface of the language, knowledge, and speech act constructions (SAC) based on a grammatical object, and the sub-model of belief, desires and intention (BDI) and dialogue management (DM) for natural language processing (NLP). A long-standing issue within NLP CSA systems is refining the accuracy of interpretation to provide realistic dialogue to support human-to-computer communication. This prototype constitutes three phase models: (1) a linguistic model based on a functional linguistic theory – Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), (2) an Agent Cognitive Model with two inner models: (a) a knowledge representation model, (b) a planning model underpinned by BDI concepts, intentionality and rational interaction, and (3) a dialogue model. The evaluation strategy for this Java-based prototype is multi-approach driven by grammatical testing (English language utterances), software engineering and agent practice. A set of evaluation criteria are grouped per phase model, and the testing framework aims to test the interface, intersection and integration of all phase models. The empirical evaluations demonstrate that the CSA is a proof-of-concept, demonstrating RRG’s fitness for purpose for describing, and explaining phenomena, language processing and knowledge, and computational adequacy. Contrastingly, evaluations identify the complexity of lower level computational mappings of NL – agent to ontology with semantic gaps, and further addressed by a lexical bridging solution.</p>

Age differences in the effect of animacy on Mandarin sentence processing.

Animate nouns are preferred for grammatical subjects, whereas inanimate nouns are preferred for grammatical objects. Animacy provides important semantic cues for sentence comprehension. However, how individuals’ ability to use this animacy cue changes with advancing age is still not clear. The current study investigated whether older adults and younger adults were differentially sensitive to this semantic constraint in processing Mandarin relative clauses, using a self-paced reading paradigm. The sentences used in the study contained subject relative clauses or object relative clauses and had animate or inanimate subjects. The results indicate that the animacy manipulation affected the younger adults more than the older adults in online processing. Younger adults had longer reading times for all segments in subject relative clauses than in object relative clauses when the subjects were inanimate, whereas there was no significant difference in reading times between subject and object relative clauses when the subjects were animate. In the older group, animacy was not found to influence the processing difficulty of subject relative clauses and object relative clauses. Compared with younger adults, older adults were less sensitive to animacy constraints in relative clause processing. The findings indicate that the use of animacy cues became less efficient in the ageing population. The results can be explained by the capacity constrained comprehension theory, according to which older adults have greater difficulty in integrating semantic information with syntactic processing due to the lack of sufficient cognitive resources.