Unaccusativity and Grammatical Aspect: A Cross-Modal Lexical Priming Study

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Syntax

Background:

• Unergative verbs assign agent theta roles to subjects, while unaccusative verbs take theme subjects.
• Linguistic theory posits that theme subjects of unaccusative verbs originate in a post-verbal position before moving to a pre-verbal subject position.
• Understanding the syntactic processing of verb types and aspect is crucial for theories of sentence comprehension.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the processing of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS).
• To examine the interplay between verbal aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) and verb type (unaccusative vs. unergative) on subject processing.
• To test the hypothesis that subjects of perfective unaccusative verbs are processed differently due to movement.

Main Methods:

• A cross-modal lexical priming experiment was employed.
• Participants processed sentences in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) featuring unergative and unaccusative verbs with different aspects.
• Neural (re-)activation patterns of subjects were tracked during sentence processing.

Main Results:

• The subject of perfective unaccusative verbs showed post-verbal (re-)activation, consistent with movement from a post-verbal position.
• This post-verbal (re-)activation pattern was not observed for unergative verbs.
• Imperfective unaccusative verbs did not elicit the same post-verbal (re-)activation as perfective unaccusative verbs.

Conclusions:

• The findings support the theory of movement for subjects of perfective unaccusative verbs.
• Verbal aspect significantly influences the processing of unaccusative subjects.
• This research provides empirical evidence for the syntactic and processing distinctions between verb types and aspects in BCS.