Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: We test the hypothesis that the interpretation of aspectual-verb sentences with an animate subject and an entity-denoting complement like “Sue finishes the book” is the result of an evaluation based on one key conceptual property: the degree of asymmetry in control power between the participants of a situation denoted by the sentence. We argue that this evaluation is not necessarily based on some inherent property of the participants but on the possible construal that the sentential context affords. Control asymmetry is thus proposed as one conceptual constraint on meaning specification in an otherwise semantically underspecified linguistic construction. In “Sue finishes the book”, high control asymmetry between “Sue” and “book” leads to an agentive or actor-undergoer interpretation (e.g., Sue is doing something that involves the book). By contrast, low control asymmetry leads to a constitutive or part-whole interpretation (e.g., The story about Sue is the last one in the book). Which reading emerges depends on whether or not the contextual cues lead to a specific control-asymmetry evaluation by the comprehender. Results of a questionnaire show that otherwise perfectly acceptable but semantically underspecified aspectual-verb sentences (i) receive multiple plausible readings in a control-asymmetry neutral context and (ii) are judged as significantly less acceptable than their control asymmetry-biased counterparts. Contrary to the conventional view which leaves out the constitutive reading, we show that (iii) the constitutive reading exists as part of the core reading of aspectual-verb sentences, and is subject to context modulation and control asymmetry calibration, unifying with the agentive reading. We argue that this pattern of contextual modulation is determined by the context’s ability to convey specific control-asymmetry possibilities. In a control-asymmetry neutral context (i.e. the control relation between the two participants is not specified), the search space within the control-asymmetry continuum is unconstrained, resulting in a computationally costlier search process. This is manifested as a more effortful and therefore less desirable comprehension experience, resulting in a lower acceptability rating, as compared to the control-asymmetry context-biased counterparts. Altogether the findings represent a clear example of sentence acceptability being susceptible to meaning composition complexity metrics emerging from lexically-driven semantic demands, above and beyond morphosyntactically-based ones.