Reading time evidence for enriched composition.
Verbs like 'begin' and 'enjoy' appear to semantically select a complement that expresses an activity or an event (Jackendoff, R. (1997). The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Pustejovsky, J. Cognition 41 (1991) 47; Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). When these verbs occur with a complement that does not directly denote either an activity or an event (e.g. '... began the book' or '... enjoyed the book'), the complement must be type-shifted from an object to an activity to conform to the verb's semantic restrictions. We report an experiment in which self-paced reading times were found to be longer for complements that required type-shifting than for complements that directly matched the semantic restrictions of the matrix verb. This finding is argued to provide on-line evidence for a type of enriched lexical processing posited in recent lexical semantic research.
McElree
B
B
Psychology Department, New York University, 8th Floor, 6 Washington Place, NY 10003-6634, USA. bdm@xp.psych.nyu.edu
Traxler
M J
MJ
Pickering
M J
MJ
Seely
R E
RE
Jackendoff
R
R
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics