Constructional Sources of Implicit Agents

Much of the literature studying on-line sentence comprehension focuses on the contributions of individual lexical items, with specific interest in verbs. One aspect of sentence meaning that has been claimed to be rooted in verb representation is event structure. There is a growing body of evidence supporting the claim that the verb is not the sole contributor of event structure, but the syntactic construction also contributes to event structure. One study that is construed to support a verb-based view is Mauner & Koenig (2000). One way to show this constructional influence is through the interpretation of a novel denominal verb (Kaschak & Glenberg 2000). We replicated Mauner & Koenig (2000) with novel denominal verbs suggesting a reinterpretation of their findings. We propose that verbs and constructions each contribute event structure to on-line sentence comprehension, and we discuss how constraintbased models can account for these results.