Thematic role focusing by participle inflections: evidence from conceptual combination

The authors examined how people integrate knowledge of agents and patients of events with the temporal and causal properties of present and past participles to constrain interpretation of isolated participle-noun phrases like arresting cop and arrested crook. Good-agent head nouns were more easily combined with present participles (e.g., arresting cop) than with past participles (e.g., arrested cop), and the reverse was true for good patients. Furthermore, present-participle good-patient phrases (e.g., serving customer) were often interpreted as verb phrases. This research provides further evidence of the interaction between morphosyntactic cues and world knowledge of events in language comprehension.