The representation and processing of argument structure constructions

The three experiments reported here investigated the linguistic notion of argument structure constructions, and provided converging evidence from psycholinguistics that such a notion is a meaningful way of characterizing linguistic knowledge.; Experiments 1 and 2 used a sentence sorting paradigm to investigate the relationship between sentence form and sentence meaning. They provided evidence for a separate contribution of the argument structure construction to sentence interpretation independent of the contribution of the verb.; Experiment 3 used a structural priming paradigm to provide a more stringent production. The key demonstration of priming with shared structure but no overlap in semantics was Bock and Loebell (1990, experiment 2). They found that by-passives (e.g. “The 747 was alerted by the control tower”) and intransitive locatives (e.g. “The 747 was landing near the control tower”) were equally effective primes for passives, relative to active controls.; Experiment 3 in this study was designed to determine whether the previous finding of structural priming in the absence of shared semantics was due to lexical overlap between the prime and the target. The results replicated those of Bock and Loebell finding priming of passives with locative containing by. However they also showed that locatives without by such as “The 747 might land near the airport control tower” did not prime passives. Thus the preposition seems to be necessary for the priming of passive sentences to occur. These data are inconsistent with previous proposals stating that The results support a characterization of passive priming as operating at an intermediate level of generalization in which the function word by is an integral part of the passive construction. These results of the three experiments suggest that theories of linguistic representation that allow for intermediate generalizations, such as Construction Grammar, are better suited to provide the representational vocabulary for the study of language processing.