Event conceptualisation and linguistic realisation: The impact of semantic and lexical factors on sentence production

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Argument structure, the argument vs. adjunct distinction, and thematic roles are most relevant for the encoding of events, but there is little agreement on the definition of these concepts. The current proposal addresses these issues from a psycholinguistic perspective, focusing on the intersection of conceptualisation and formulation in sentence production. Structural priming experiments will help to dissociate the predictions based on a strictly incremental model of sentence production from predictions made by a lexicalist account. The assumption of strict incrementality entails the hypothesis that conceptual factors are the main determinants of linguistic encoding. Thus, lexical information has only little impact on formulation whereas the thematic hierarchy guides mapping of thematic roles onto syntactic functions. However, a referent that is salient, e.g., in discourse may be realised earlier than suggested by its thematic position. By contrast, a participant that is not focused might not be encoded at all and remain implicit. Structural persistence is expected to affect thematic relations in a way that resembles a contextual manipulation: It adds to the availability of a conceptual representation displaying an order of thematic roles that is incongruent with the thematic hierarchy. Lexicalist accounts claim that lexical information triggers the mapping of thematic roles onto syntactic functions. If structural priming targets lexical representations, there should be no effect in the case of conceptual similarity without lexical and syntactic similarity. Moreover, effects of verb repetition should be restricted to arguments. An effect of verb repetition that generalizes to structures with adjuncts points to a dynamic representation of the syntactic contexts in which the verb occurs. The proposed experiments will test how relations are encoded that include implicit arguments, adjuncts, or non-prototypical thematic roles, because these relations allow us to investigate the impact of conceptual and lexical factors. The results will promote the understanding of the mechanisms that map preverbal messages onto syntactic structures. They will help to specify relevant representations and processes of conceptualisation and functional encoding in order to integrate them into a model of language production. Finally, the insights drawn from the experiments will be used to consolidate the relevant linguistic notions in the cognitive domain.