The contribution of argument structure constructions to sentence meaning

By Giulia M. L. Bencini, Adele E. Goldberg. 2000

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract What types of linguistic information do people use to construct the meaning of a sentence? Most linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension assume that the main determinant of sentence meaning is the verb. This idea was argued explicitly in Healy and Miller (1970). When asked to sort sentences according to their meaning, Healy and Miller found that participants were more likely to sort sentences according to the main verb in the sentence than according to the subject argument. On the basis of these results, the authors concluded that the verb was the main determinant of sentence meaning. In this study we used the same sorting paradigm to explore the possibility that there is another strong influence on sentence interpretation: the configuration of complements (the argument structure construction). Our results showed that participants did produce sorts by construction, despite a well-documented tendency for subjects to sort on the basis of a single dimension, which would favor sorts by verb.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/883725f237f5b6ca34fbbb520e6ecec9dc4518ff

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Citations in the corpus

The nature of generalization in language (2009, background): “In a separate study, Bencini and Goldberg (2000) performed a classification task that aimed to compare the semantic contribution of the construction with that of the morphological form of the verb when determining overall sentence meaning.”
Abstract sentence representations in 3-year-olds: Evidence from language production and comprehension (2008, unknown): “…clause-level constructions, both in child language processing (Fisher, 2002; Tomasello, 2000a, 2000b) and adult language processing (Bencini, 2002; Bencini & Goldberg, 2000; Bock, 1986; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Bock, Loebell, & Morey, 1992; Chang, Bock, & Goldberg, 2003; Goldberg, 1995; Goldberg &…”
Psycholinguistic and corpus-linguistic evidence for L2 constructions (2009, methodology): “The second experiment investigated to what extent language learners’ potential semantic knowledge of argument structure constructions is reflected in their grouping of sentences in a sorting task (as previously conducted with native speakers by Bencini and Goldberg, 2000).”
Assessing syntactic sophistication in L2 writing: A usage-based approach (2017, background): “Research has suggested that VACs are not merely bare forms on which to place words, but carry meaning for both L1 (Bencini & Goldberg, 2000; Chang, Bock, & Goldberg, 2003; Hare & Goldberg, 1999) and L2 (Gries & Wulff, 2005) users.”
Do foreign language learners also have constructions (2005, background): “Apparently, then, the subjects relied more on the complement configu rations and the corresponding semantics than on the superficial lexical similarity for sorting and that, even for language learners, argument structure constructions “are psychologically real linguistic categories that speakers use”