{"pk":26556,"title":"On the psychological reality of linguistic event structures","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How language represents meaning remains a central topic of debate in linguistics. On some accounts, the nounphrases in a sentence are identified semantically by a list of independent atomic labels (thematic roles), ordered relative to oneanother depending on the position of the nouns around the verb (e.g., AGENT-THEME-GOAL). Others instead capture suchinterdependencies with complex, non-atomic event structures (e.g., [x CAUSE [y TO-COME-TO-BE-AT z]]). Here, we usestructural priming to investigate the psychological reality of these two theories of semantic representation. On the thematicrole approach, we should expect to see priming between theme-first locatives and prepositional-object datives (both VP-NP-PPsyntactically) precisely because their thematic ordering is consistent across the two constructions. The event structure approachposits no such minimal semantic structural similarity, such that we should not see priming cross-constructionally. We find onlywithin-construction priming (N=52) and not across-construction priming (total N=344), in favor of event structures.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5042n8rq","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jayden","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ziegler","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Jesse","middle_name":"","last_name":"Snedeker","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26556/galley/16192/download/"}]}