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The Contribution of Argument Structure Constructions to Sentence Meaning,☆☆

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Abstract

What types of linguistic information do people use to construct the meaning of a sentence? Most linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension assume that the main determinant of sentence meaning is the verb. This idea was argued explicitly in Healy and Miller (1970). When asked to sort sentences according to their meaning, Healy and Miller found that participants were more likely to sort sentences according to the main verb in the sentence than according to the subject argument. On the basis of these results, the authors concluded that the verb was the main determinant of sentence meaning. In this study we used the same sorting paradigm to explore the possibility that there is another strong influence on sentence interpretation: the configuration of complements (the argument structure construction). Our results showed that participants did produce sorts by construction, despite a well-documented tendency for subjects to sort on the basis of a single dimension, which would favor sorts by verb.

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    The research reported here was supported by NSF Grant SBR-9873450 to the second author. Portions of this work were reported at the 21st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Vancouver in August, 1999. The authors thank Alice Healy, Laura Michaelis, Gregory Murphy, Alberto Nocentini, Bob Rehder, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on this project and I-Chiant Chiang, Malcolm MacIver and Linda May for their assistance in classifying the protocols for Experiment 2.

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    Address correspondence and reprint requests to Giulia Bencini, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, 405 North Mathews, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801.

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