Prominence is the hierarchical relation among arguments that allows us to understand &amp... more Prominence is the hierarchical relation among arguments that allows us to understand 'Who did what to whom' in a sentence. The present study aimed to provide evidence about the role of prominence information for the incremental interpretation of arguments in Spanish. We investigated the time course of neural correlates associated to the comprehension of sentences that require a reversal of argument prominence hierarchization. We also studied how the amount of available prominence information may affect the incremental build-up of verbal expectations. Results of the ERP data revealed that at the disambiguating verb region, object-initial sentences (only one argument available) elicited a centro-parietal negativity with a peak at 400ms post-onset. Subject-initial sentences (two arguments available) yielded a broadly distributed positivity at around 650ms. This dissociation suggests that argument interpretation may depend on their morphosyntactic features, and also on the amount of prominence information available before the verb is encountered.
In a study about sentence comprehension, Gattei, Vasishth and Dickey (2010) performed a self-pace... more In a study about sentence comprehension, Gattei, Vasishth and Dickey (2010) performed a self-paced reading task using Spanish Object Experiencer Psych verbs and Dative Agentive verbs. Both types of verbs differ in the way the semantic arguments are mapped over the syntactic structure, and can therefore show possible differences in processing coming from the syntax-semantics interface. The results showed that when the semantic arguments of a sentence are mapped indirectly over the syntactic structure (e.g. gustarle), readers take longer time to process the second argument than when the semantic arguments are mapped directly (e.g. gritarle). Besides, the study showed that readers also took longer time to read the second argument when the syntactic order was manipulated (SVO vs OVS) and the order of the sentence did not respect the semantic hierarchy required by the verb. The present study investigates whether both effects (type of mapping and semantic hierarchy order) occur due to dif...
Previous results from a self-paced reading study using Spanish Object Experiencer Psych verbs (e.... more Previous results from a self-paced reading study using Spanish Object Experiencer Psych verbs (e.g. ‘gustarle’) and Dative verbs (e.g. ‘gritarle’) showed that readers took longer to process the second argument of the sentences when the verb belonged to the first group. This could mean that differences in the way the semantic arguments are mapped onto the syntactic structure could have an impact on on-going comprehension. Apart from this, the mentioned study shows that comprehension is enhanced when the arguments follow the canonical semantic order (i.e. ‘Experiencer’/’Actor’ – ‘Undergoer’). However, it might be the case that these differences in both the on-line and the off-line tasks are the result of using verbs from two different semantic categories, mainly Psych-verbs and Action verbs. To account for this possibility, a second study using two types of Psych-verbs in Spanish was performed. These groups of verbs map their semantic arguments into the syntax in different ways as wel...
A general VHDL description, allowing to synthesize a set of B-ISDN user network interface (UNI) K... more A general VHDL description, allowing to synthesize a set of B-ISDN user network interface (UNI) KS for the different SDH levels (155, 622,... Mbit/s), is presented. The synthesized UNI ICs allow a STM-I on STM-Nframe multiplexation or to directly perform the payload mapping of N 155 Mbit/s ATM cell streams on a STM-N frame in a compact and cost-effective manner.
El apotegma gnoseológico de Platón (“...conocer es recordar...”) puede ser reinterpretado y pensa... more El apotegma gnoseológico de Platón (“...conocer es recordar...”) puede ser reinterpretado y pensar, entonces, que conocer implica evocar las estructuras semióticas del lenguaje, aquello dado previo a todo pensar filosófico. La identificación de los esquemas del Evento Motriz en una lengua que presento aquí, así como sus proyecciones a otros dominios cognitivos, pretenden contribuir a explicar cómo a través del lenguaje somos capaces de alcanzar conocimientos con cierta validez universal intersubjetiva a partir de una mente corporeizada y, por ende, limitada a un contexto de experiencia específico. Describo los esquemas semánticos básicos subyacentes al sistema verbal del castellano y que permiten a los hablantes la captación y expresión de sus experiencias motrices. Siguiendo a Talmy (2000) caracterizo, además, la particular estrategia representativa de nuestra lengua y la comparo, por oposición, con la del inglés. Por último, sugiero que estas estrategias determinan una particular ...
Este estudio tiene dos objetivos enmarcados en el establecimiento de contrastes entre lenguas med... more Este estudio tiene dos objetivos enmarcados en el establecimiento de contrastes entre lenguas mediante una gramática de interfaces. El primero es describir la estructura característica de la construcción resultativa del inglés (KR), analizar una muestra representativa de sus subtipos y explicitar las condiciones sintáctico-semánticas que la hacen posible. KR es una Macrosituación que fusiona dos Situaciones -una Actividad y un Evento- en la secuencia de un 'curso causal de Situaciones' tal que el Evento es el Resultado de la Actividad. Alcanzar esta caracterización requiere subsumir Manera bajo Actividad, Resultado bajo Cambio y CAUSA bajo ‘curso causal de Situaciones’. El segundo objetivo es exponer los factores que habilitan la presencia de KR en inglés y que solo permiten una escueta presencia en español. KR es la Macrosituación complementaria de la Situación prototípica del inglés, Situación que se opone a la del español ya que presenta una Actividad como verbo principal...
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), Jan 20, 2014
Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the... more Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand 'who did what to whom' in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting Role and Reference Grammar and the extended Argument Dependency Model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: Clauses with object-experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked and thus, they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax-semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of se...
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), Jan 20, 2014
Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the... more Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand 'who did what to whom' in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting Role and Reference Grammar and the extended Argument Dependency Model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: Clauses with object-experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked and thus, they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax-semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of se...
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Dec 20, 2014
Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the... more Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand “who did what to whom” in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object–experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax–semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence ...
In this paper I propose two complementary hypotheses on the construction of event representations... more In this paper I propose two complementary hypotheses on the construction of event representations. The first one is that English displays a preference for codifying Processes in the semantic representations of verbs while Spanish favors Events. I call this thesis ‘aspectual preference’. The second hypothesis –called ‘compensatory’- is that the two languages have syntactic constructions that introduce the devalued semantic resource –either Process or Event, respectively- and, therefore, these constructions counterweight the unbalance produced by the aspectual preferences in the lexicon. The Spanish Internal Gerund Construction (IGC) allows speakers to introduce Processes that specify the internal parts of an Event. The English Resultative Construction (RC) permits speakers to introduce Results into Processes that, hence, become enclosed and turned into Events. The compensatory interpretation is further backed up by absence of IGC in English and the lack of RG in English. This contrast between the procedures for construction of event representations is further corroborated by the causative alternation. The point of departure in English is a simple, mono-event semantics that gets richer by incorporating a causative subevent through syntactic means. In contrast, the Spanish strategy is not of enrichment but of extraction: A complex Event is split apart by morphosyntax.
Prominence is the hierarchical relation among arguments that allows us to understand &amp... more Prominence is the hierarchical relation among arguments that allows us to understand 'Who did what to whom' in a sentence. The present study aimed to provide evidence about the role of prominence information for the incremental interpretation of arguments in Spanish. We investigated the time course of neural correlates associated to the comprehension of sentences that require a reversal of argument prominence hierarchization. We also studied how the amount of available prominence information may affect the incremental build-up of verbal expectations. Results of the ERP data revealed that at the disambiguating verb region, object-initial sentences (only one argument available) elicited a centro-parietal negativity with a peak at 400ms post-onset. Subject-initial sentences (two arguments available) yielded a broadly distributed positivity at around 650ms. This dissociation suggests that argument interpretation may depend on their morphosyntactic features, and also on the amount of prominence information available before the verb is encountered.
In a study about sentence comprehension, Gattei, Vasishth and Dickey (2010) performed a self-pace... more In a study about sentence comprehension, Gattei, Vasishth and Dickey (2010) performed a self-paced reading task using Spanish Object Experiencer Psych verbs and Dative Agentive verbs. Both types of verbs differ in the way the semantic arguments are mapped over the syntactic structure, and can therefore show possible differences in processing coming from the syntax-semantics interface. The results showed that when the semantic arguments of a sentence are mapped indirectly over the syntactic structure (e.g. gustarle), readers take longer time to process the second argument than when the semantic arguments are mapped directly (e.g. gritarle). Besides, the study showed that readers also took longer time to read the second argument when the syntactic order was manipulated (SVO vs OVS) and the order of the sentence did not respect the semantic hierarchy required by the verb. The present study investigates whether both effects (type of mapping and semantic hierarchy order) occur due to dif...
Previous results from a self-paced reading study using Spanish Object Experiencer Psych verbs (e.... more Previous results from a self-paced reading study using Spanish Object Experiencer Psych verbs (e.g. ‘gustarle’) and Dative verbs (e.g. ‘gritarle’) showed that readers took longer to process the second argument of the sentences when the verb belonged to the first group. This could mean that differences in the way the semantic arguments are mapped onto the syntactic structure could have an impact on on-going comprehension. Apart from this, the mentioned study shows that comprehension is enhanced when the arguments follow the canonical semantic order (i.e. ‘Experiencer’/’Actor’ – ‘Undergoer’). However, it might be the case that these differences in both the on-line and the off-line tasks are the result of using verbs from two different semantic categories, mainly Psych-verbs and Action verbs. To account for this possibility, a second study using two types of Psych-verbs in Spanish was performed. These groups of verbs map their semantic arguments into the syntax in different ways as wel...
A general VHDL description, allowing to synthesize a set of B-ISDN user network interface (UNI) K... more A general VHDL description, allowing to synthesize a set of B-ISDN user network interface (UNI) KS for the different SDH levels (155, 622,... Mbit/s), is presented. The synthesized UNI ICs allow a STM-I on STM-Nframe multiplexation or to directly perform the payload mapping of N 155 Mbit/s ATM cell streams on a STM-N frame in a compact and cost-effective manner.
El apotegma gnoseológico de Platón (“...conocer es recordar...”) puede ser reinterpretado y pensa... more El apotegma gnoseológico de Platón (“...conocer es recordar...”) puede ser reinterpretado y pensar, entonces, que conocer implica evocar las estructuras semióticas del lenguaje, aquello dado previo a todo pensar filosófico. La identificación de los esquemas del Evento Motriz en una lengua que presento aquí, así como sus proyecciones a otros dominios cognitivos, pretenden contribuir a explicar cómo a través del lenguaje somos capaces de alcanzar conocimientos con cierta validez universal intersubjetiva a partir de una mente corporeizada y, por ende, limitada a un contexto de experiencia específico. Describo los esquemas semánticos básicos subyacentes al sistema verbal del castellano y que permiten a los hablantes la captación y expresión de sus experiencias motrices. Siguiendo a Talmy (2000) caracterizo, además, la particular estrategia representativa de nuestra lengua y la comparo, por oposición, con la del inglés. Por último, sugiero que estas estrategias determinan una particular ...
Este estudio tiene dos objetivos enmarcados en el establecimiento de contrastes entre lenguas med... more Este estudio tiene dos objetivos enmarcados en el establecimiento de contrastes entre lenguas mediante una gramática de interfaces. El primero es describir la estructura característica de la construcción resultativa del inglés (KR), analizar una muestra representativa de sus subtipos y explicitar las condiciones sintáctico-semánticas que la hacen posible. KR es una Macrosituación que fusiona dos Situaciones -una Actividad y un Evento- en la secuencia de un 'curso causal de Situaciones' tal que el Evento es el Resultado de la Actividad. Alcanzar esta caracterización requiere subsumir Manera bajo Actividad, Resultado bajo Cambio y CAUSA bajo ‘curso causal de Situaciones’. El segundo objetivo es exponer los factores que habilitan la presencia de KR en inglés y que solo permiten una escueta presencia en español. KR es la Macrosituación complementaria de la Situación prototípica del inglés, Situación que se opone a la del español ya que presenta una Actividad como verbo principal...
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), Jan 20, 2014
Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the... more Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand 'who did what to whom' in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting Role and Reference Grammar and the extended Argument Dependency Model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: Clauses with object-experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked and thus, they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax-semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of se...
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), Jan 20, 2014
Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the... more Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand 'who did what to whom' in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting Role and Reference Grammar and the extended Argument Dependency Model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: Clauses with object-experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked and thus, they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax-semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of se...
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Dec 20, 2014
Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the... more Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand “who did what to whom” in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object–experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax–semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence ...
In this paper I propose two complementary hypotheses on the construction of event representations... more In this paper I propose two complementary hypotheses on the construction of event representations. The first one is that English displays a preference for codifying Processes in the semantic representations of verbs while Spanish favors Events. I call this thesis ‘aspectual preference’. The second hypothesis –called ‘compensatory’- is that the two languages have syntactic constructions that introduce the devalued semantic resource –either Process or Event, respectively- and, therefore, these constructions counterweight the unbalance produced by the aspectual preferences in the lexicon. The Spanish Internal Gerund Construction (IGC) allows speakers to introduce Processes that specify the internal parts of an Event. The English Resultative Construction (RC) permits speakers to introduce Results into Processes that, hence, become enclosed and turned into Events. The compensatory interpretation is further backed up by absence of IGC in English and the lack of RG in English. This contrast between the procedures for construction of event representations is further corroborated by the causative alternation. The point of departure in English is a simple, mono-event semantics that gets richer by incorporating a causative subevent through syntactic means. In contrast, the Spanish strategy is not of enrichment but of extraction: A complex Event is split apart by morphosyntax.
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