Thematic Role Assignment in Context

Two experiments are described in which participants read sentences of the form “He drank some . . .” in contexts which either did or did not introduce something drinkable. Participants were more likely to report that the sentence stopped making sense at the verb “drank” if nothing drinkable had been introduced. When participants responded, in this case, that the verb did make sense, their reaction times tended to be elevated relative to when the context did introduce a suitable antecedent. The experiments were modeled on a series of studies reported by Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, and Carlson (1995), who used the same stop-making-sense judgment task to investigate the processing of filler-gap dependencies of the form “I wondered which food the man drank . . . .” They observed increased “no” responses on the verb when the prior filler was an implausible recipient of the patient role associated with the verb and concluded that the wh-phrase is assigned a thematic role as soon as the verb “drank” is encountered. In the studies reported here, with materials which did not contain obligatory syntactic (filler-gap) dependencies, the equivalent phenomenon was observed—thematic information conveyed by a verb’s lexical entry was apparently evaluated, at the verb, with respect to its fit with whatever contextually introduced entities were available to receive the associated role. The data suggest that thematic roles may be assigned at a verb on the basis of thematic fit with context. © 1999 Academic Press