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

CAROLINA GATTEI; ALEJANDRO WAINSELBOIM; LUIS PARÍS

Florianópolis

Congreso; Language and Neuroscience Conference; 2012

Universidad Federal de Santa Catarina

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 thesentences when the verb belonged to the first group. This could meanthat differences in the way the semantic arguments are mapped onto thesyntactic structure could have an impact on on-going comprehension.Apart from this, the mentioned study shows that comprehension isenhanced when the arguments follow the canonical semantic order (i.e.?Experiencer?/?Actor? ? ?Undergoer?). However, it might be the case thatthese differences in both the on-line and the off-line tasks are the resultof using verbs from two different semantic categories, mainly Psych-verbsand Action verbs. To account for this possibility, a second study using twotypes of Psych-verbs in Spanish was performed. These groups of verbsmap their semantic arguments into the syntax in different ways as well,Abstracts59and are therefore known as Subject Experiencer vs. Object ExperiencerPsych-verbs (Belletti & Rizzi, 1988). They also show differences in theword order needed to respect the semantic hierarchy (i.e. SVO for thefirst group and OVS for the second group). Thus, they can provide furtherevidence about how information proceeding from the syntax-semanticsinterface influences sentence comprehension. In the off-line task, thestudy replicated the results from the first experiment. Participantsresponded questions significantly faster and more accurately whenthe order of the sentence previously presented respected the semantichierarchy. Nevertheless, the pattern of results found on the on-line taskshowed that participants took longer to process the second argumentof sentences when the verb belonged to the group of verbs with directmapping (SubjExp Psych verbs). They also showed larger latencies whenthe sentence was presented in the canonical syntactic order of Spanish.In the present study we aim to disentangle the results obtained in thetwo previous experiments. We believe that the results from the on-linetask of the second experiment are a consequence of the trade-off betweenstudying verbs from the same category and differences in case assignmentof the Theme argument of these verbs. In Spanish, SubjExp Psych-verbsassign accusative case while ObjExp Psych-verbs assign dative case. Thischaracteristic becomes relevant since Spanish accusative pre-verbal cliticis only mandatory when the reference has been named before (as in ?[LamaestraNOM] laACC quiere.? - ?The teacher loves her.?] but it is not obligatorywhen it precedes the object (as in ?[La maestraNOM] (laACC) ama [a lacocineraACC.]? ? ?The teacher loves the cook?). On the contrary, dative preverbalclitic is obligatory in both situations (as in ?[La maestraNOM] leDATgusta.? - ?She/he likes the teacher? and ?[La maestraNOM] leDAT gusta[a lacocineraDAT].? - ?The cook likes the teacher.?). In this study, we examine theconsequences of adding non-obligatory clitics for sentence incrementalparsing, and we discuss the importance of these results for expectationbasedparsing models.