The Linguistic Representation and Processing of Event Structure

Abstract

Current linguistic theories suggest that inherent temporal boundedness (telicity) may underlie syntactic representations of sentences. Corpus analysis and acceptability judgments showed a weak relation between telicity and syntactic form. Two experiments on self-paced reading of sentences with reduced relative clauses showed that argument structure preferences had immediate effects on the garden path but verb telicity did not, nor did the garden path depend on an interaction of verb telicity with object specificity or preposition. A probe recognition experiment showed that response times were faster for sentences with a telic predicate. The results suggest early access to argument structure preferences and later access to a derived semantic representation of temporal boundedness.