Spanish Psych-verbs: Do Case constraints influence incremental parsing?

GATTEI, CAROLINA; WAINSELBOIM, ALEJANDRO; PARIS, LUIS

Florianópolis, Santa Catarina

Conferencia; Language and Neuroscience Conference; 2012

Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil

Previous results from a self-paced reading study using Spanish ObjectExperiencer Psych verbs (e.g. ?gustarle?) and Dative verbs (e.g. ?gritarle?) showed that readers took longer to process the second argument of the sentences when the verb belonged to the first group. This could mean that differences in the way the semantic arguments are mapped onto the syntactic structure could have an impact on on-going comprehension. Apart from this, the mentioned study shows that comprehension is enhanced when the arguments follow the canonical semantic order (i.e. ?Experiencer?/?Actor? ? ?Undergoer?). However, it might be the case that these differences in both the on-line and the off-line tasks are the result of using verbs from two different semantic categories, mainly Psych-verbs and Action verbs.To account for this possibility, a second study using two types of Psych-verbsin Spanish was performed. These groups of verbs map their semantic arguments into the syntax in different ways as well, and are therefore known as Subject Experiencer vs Object Experiencer Psych-verbs (Belleti & Rizzi, 1980). They also show differences in the word order needed to respect the semantic hierarchy (i.e. SVO for the first group and OVS for the second group). Thus, they can provide further evidence about how information proceeding from the syntax-semantics interface influences sentence comprehension. In the off-line task, the study replicated the results from the first experiment. Participants responded questions significantly faster and more accurately when the order of the sentence previously presented respected the semantic hierarchy.Nevertheless, the pattern of results found on the on-line task showed that participants took longer to process the second argument of sentences when the verb belonged to the group of verbs with direct mapping (SubjExp Psych verbs). They also showed larger latencies when the sentence was presented in the canonical syntactic order of Spanish.In the present study we aim to disentangle the results obtained in the twoprevious experiments. We believe that the results from the on-line task of the second experiment are a consequence of the trade-off between studying verbs from the same category and differences in case assignment of the Theme argument of these verbs.In Spanish, SubjExp Psych-verbs assign accusative case while ObjExp Psych-verbs assign dative case. This characteristic becomes relevant since Spanish accusative pre-verbal clitic is only mandatory when the reference has been named before (as in ?[La maestraNOM] laACC quiere.? - ?The teacher loves her.?] but it is not obligatory when it precedes the object (as in ?[La maestraNOM] (laACC) ama [a la cocineraACC.]? ? ?The teacher loves the cook?). On the contrary, dative pre-verbal clitic is obligatory in both situations (as in ?[La maestraNOM] leDAT gusta.? - ?She/he likes the teacher? and ?[LamaestraNOM] leDAT gusta[a la cocineraDAT].? - ?The cook likes the teacher.?). In this study, we examine the consequences of adding non-obligatory clitics for sentence incremental parsing, and we discuss the importance of these results for expectation-based parsing models.