Glossa Psycholinguistics

Abstract

Prediction, both on the syntactic and the semantic level, is a central process in language comprehension. For instance, people predict aspects of event structure based on morphosyntactic markers on verbs: hearing has peeled directs one's attention towards a culminated event, as opposed to an ongoing event. Here, we ask how general this prediction process is, and specifically, whether it extends to cues outside the predicate, using the Hindi split-ergative system as case study. Ergativity allows properties of an event to be predicted on the subject, notably a constituent outside the Verb Phrase. In four studies, we map out the role subject marking plays for prediction of event properties in comprehension. Our results show that in some offline judgments, ergativity is a strong predictor of culminated events; but the cue provided by ergative marking is not taken into account during incremental comprehension, questioning accounts of automatically triggered culmination inferences in ergative constructions as well as providing evidence for a limit of predictive processing