Psycholinguistic evidence for unaccusativity in an SOV language: A syntactic priming in comprehension

Abstract

The unaccusative hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978) states that a theme subject of an unaccusative verb is originally an object, as schematized in (1a). In an unergative construction, in contrast, an agent subject originates in subject position, as shown in (1b). (1) a. Unaccusatives: NP1 [VP V t1] b. Unergatives: NP [VP V] The unaccusative hypothesis has been motivated on theoretical grounds (Borer and Grodzinsky 1986; Burzio 1986; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995) and further supported by psycholinguistic research (Friedmann et al. 2008; Momma et al. 2018). However, this hypothesis is hard to test in SOV (Subject Object Verb) languages like Japanese, because a surface word order does not provide sufficient information to determine the syntactic nature of the unaccusative subject. In other words, whether movement takes place or not, the surface word order is subject-verb. Hence, it remains less clear whether the subject of the unaccusative in Japanese is base-generated in subject position (Kishimoto 1996) (2a) or base-generated in object position and moves up to subject position (Miyagawa 1989; Takezawa 1991; Hasegawa 2007) (2b). (2) a. NP [VP V] b. NP1 [VP t1 V] The current study is aimed to test whether the unaccusative hypothesis holds in Japanese by conducting a sentence processing experiment