The recovery of thematic role structure during noun-noun interpretation

We examined how people use their knowledge of events to recover thematic role structure during the interpretation of noun-noun phrases. All phrases included one noun that was a good-agent/ poor-patient (prosecutor) in a particular event (accuse), and the other noun was a good-patient/poor-agent (defendant) for the same event If people interpret the noun-noun phrases by inverting the nouns and applying a thematic relation (see Downing, 1977; Levi, 1978), phrases should be interpreted more easily when the head nouns typically are good agents and the modifiers are good patients for specific events. Two experiments supported these predictions. Furthermore, the results indicated that in the less preferred thematic order (agent-patient), people often generated interpretations in which the modifiers became the focus of the interpretations. This finding suggests that violating thematic role preferences is one constraint on when the inversion process occurs during noun-noun interpretation.