Arguments for adjuncts

Jean-Pierre Koeniga,c,*, Gail Maunerb,c, Breton Bienvenueb,c

aLinguistics Department, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USAbPsychology Department, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA

cCenter for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA

Received 22 May 2001; revised 18 September 2002; accepted 12 March 2003

Abstract

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that some semantic participant information

is lexically encoded in the representation of verbs and some is not. In this paper, we propose that

semantic obligatoriness and verb class specificity are criteria which influence whether semantic

information is lexically encoded. We present a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon,

a sentence continuation study, and an on-line sentence processing study which confirm that both

factors play a role in the lexical encoding of participant information.

q 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Verb; Arguments; Adjuncts; Argument structure; Sentence processing; Lexical semantics; Lexicon;

Instruments; Locations

1. Introduction

Most utterances describe situations. One immediate task of addressees is to determine

who participated in those situations and the nature of this participation. To successfully

complete this task, addressees can rely on their knowledge of situations and of their

language’s lexicon and grammar. A goal of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and

computational linguistics is to determine the contribution of each of these sources to

the process of understanding an utterance. It is common among linguists to assume that a

significant portion of the situational information which addressees retrieve is associated

with the sentence’s verb(s). In a sentence such as Mary washed her hands, for instance, the

type of situation being described, the number of entities that it must include, as well as

0022-2860/03/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00082-9

Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103

www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT

* Corresponding author. Department of Linguistics, 609 Baldy Hall, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-

1030, USA. Tel.: þ1-716-645-2177, ext. 717; fax: þ1-716-645-3825.

E-mail address: jpkoenig@acsu.buffalo.edu (J.P. Koenig).

their modes of participation in the situation are assumed to be encoded in the lexical entry

for the verb washed, such that upon encountering washed, readers will include in their

representations this schematic information. In contrast, other kinds of schematic

situational participants are claimed to have a different status; they are not included in

the lexical entry of particular verbs. Participants whose presence and mode of participation

in the situation are associated with particular verbs are typically called arguments; those

which are not are called adjuncts. Unfortunately, while most linguists agree that the

distinction between arguments and adjuncts is real, no consensus currently exists as to its

basis, the boundary between the two classes, or its role in grammar. In particular, there is

no generally agreed upon answer to the following question: what are the criteria that

determine which semantic dependents are included in the representation of particular

lexical entries? In this paper, we propose a preliminary answer to this question and provide

quantitative and experimental evidence that supports it.

2. The argument/adjunct distinction

It is common since at least Tesniere (1959) to distinguish between two classes of

dependents of verbs like cut in sentence (1):

(1) Mary cuts out paper dolls

with her embroidery scissors for her children on the porch every week-end

The noun phrases (NPs) Mary and paper dolls are assumed to correspond to schematic

participant information (roughly speaking, agent and patient roles, respectively)1 encoded

in the entry for cut, and are typically called arguments of the verb. All the prepositional

phrases (PPs) in sentence (1), on the other hand, are typically excluded from the lexical

entry of cut and are typically (although not universally) called adjuncts. The intuition

behind this classification of schematic participant information contributed by verbs is that

the required presence of two schematic participants – and two NPs which express them –

is a property of cut. In contrast, the presence of other participants in the situation (and PPs

which express them, italicized in sentence (1)) is neither required nor depends on the

particular verb the speaker chose. These participants could co-occur with most other verbs.

The same distinction is sometimes characterized with the pair of terms complement and

adjunct/modifier. To avoid terminological confusion, we will reserve the dichotomy

between argument and adjunct for the semantic side of the purported distinction illustrated

in sentence (1) and complement and modifier for its syntactic correlate. Finally, the set that

comprises both arguments and adjuncts we call semantic dependents whereas we talk of

syntactic dependents for the set which includes both complements and modifiers.

The distinction between arguments and adjuncts is crucial to most current linguistic

frameworks (see, among others, Bresnan, 1982; Chomsky, 1981, 1986; Foley & Van

1 We use here the traditional names of agent and patient for mere convenience, despite the fact that, as we point

out later, there is no single coherent notion of agent (or patient, for that matter), but only a collection of various

agent (and patient) roles.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10368

Valin, 1984; Pollard & Sag, 1987). In all these approaches, argument information included

in the representations of lexical entries drives the construction of clauses. Thus, the

(required) occurrence of subject and direct object NPs in sentence (1) and the participant

roles they bear follows from the inclusion of some syntactic and/or semantic information

in the entry for cut which encodes the fact that it describes situations in which an agent and

patient participate. As a consequence, the syntactic structure of many sentences is mostly

or entirely determined by the information about situation participants included in lexical

entries of verbs.

The distinction between arguments and adjuncts is not only important to current

linguistic theorizing, but also to research on human sentence processing. Speer and Clifton

(1998) and Schutze and Gibson (1999), for example, have adduced empirical evidence to

support the claim that the human sentence processing mechanism gives precedence to

arguments in building the representation of a sentence (see also Boland &

Boehm-Jernigan, 1998; Liversedge, Pickering, Branigan, & Van Gompel, 1998). The

former provide data which suggest that readers read PPs faster when they express

arguments of a verb than when they express adjuncts, even when the two PPs are equated

for their relative plausibility. The latter suggest that upon encountering a phrase which can

ambiguously attach in the current structural representation of the sentence, the parser

prefers attachments which make the ambiguous phrase an argument. Finally, the

distinction between arguments and adjuncts bears on the processing of implicit participant

information discussed in Mauner, Tanenhaus, and Carlson (1995), Koenig and Mauner

(1999), and Mauner and Koenig (2000). This research suggests that as soon as the passive

verb is encountered, e.g. sold in sentence (2a), an agent participant role is included in the

reader’s representation of the sentence. By contrast, no agent role is included in a reader’s

representation following the access of the middle verb sold in sentence (2b).

(2) a. The vase was sold to collect money for the charity.

b. *The vase sold to collect money for the charity.

Because of the presence of an implicit agent in sentence (2a), the unexpressed subject

of the rationale clause finds an antecedent and readers do not experience processing

difficulties at collect; by contrast, the unavailability of a lexically encoded agent creates

processing difficulties for readers of sentence (2b). The fact that implicit agent

information, which can be optionally expressed through a by-phrase, is lexically encoded

and affects the processing of subsequent rationale clauses raises the possibility that some

of the italicized optionally expressed constituents in sentence (1) are also lexically

encoded and may affect processing of dependent expressions or of displaced fillers. But,

which ones?

Despite the linguistic and psycholinguistic importance of the distinction between

argument and adjunct participant information, we do not believe that reliable criteria to

distinguish between these two sorts of information currently exist. Many behavioral

distinctions that are used to distinguish between arguments and adjuncts are not reliable, as

has been pointed out in several papers (see Miller, 1997; Schutze, 1995; Vater, 1978).

Furthermore, the criteria which have been proposed are, at best, epiphenomenal and of

relatively low frequency (e.g. verb phrase (VP) ellipsis, constraints on extraction). They do

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 69

not constitute properties that are reliably present in the environment and that could cause

some participant information to become encoded in speakers’ mental lexicon. The next

section proposes a set of semantic properties which (i) reliably determine the degree to

which a participant role is lexically encoded in a verb’s lexical representation and (ii) are

easily observable and might therefore cause some participant information to be lexically

encoded.

3. The semantic basis of the argument/adjunct distinction

Our saying that information is “included in” lexical entries should not be taken too

literally. Although throughout this paper we use traditional linguistic terminology,

according to which, information is metaphorically said to be “included in” lexical entries,

our proposal does not depend on the accuracy of this metaphor. It can, for example, be

recast as “strong associations” between a phonological representation, a predicate

meaning, and participant “slots” which are in turn operationalized through weighted

connections among distributed nodes. A detailed picture of what lexical encoding amounts

to is more than we can do in this paper. We can, however, outline our representational

assumptions regarding the nature and organization of lexical knowledge in order to

motivate our criteria for the lexical encoding of participant information.

Simply put, we assume that the organization of the mental lexicon can be described as a

multidimensional hierarchy of categories, very much along the lines of a traditional

semantic network (see Collins, Quillian, & Ross, 1970; Quillian, 1968). Each category can

include a combination of syntactic, semantic, and morphological information. Words

which are members of these categories are linked to the most specific categories of which

they are members and each category can itself be linked to more general categories. The

situation is illustrated informally in Fig. 1.

Each node in the figure represents a cluster of semantic, syntactic, or graphemic/pho-

nological information. Thus, the semantic representation of the transitive use of break is

represented by the node labeled breakcaus. It inherits schematic participant information

from two general semantic classes, the class of situations which include a cause,

represented by the node labeled cause-relation and the class of situations which include an

affected entity, represented by the node labeled affected-relation. The word break also

Fig. 1. A schematic “network”-based representation of lexical information. Dashed lines indicate the presence of

intermediary nodes between two categories; pointed arrows indicate that the association between two categories

is more complex than strict inheritance.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10370

inherits from the node labeled transitive-verb which summarizes information which

characterizes the syntactic category of transitive verbs. Because this syntactic category is

itself associated with the semantic nodes representing situations which include causes and

affected entities, as argued by various scholars (see Goldberg, 1995 for a review), the

nodes cause-relation and affected-relation are also activated by the category transitive-

verb.2 In fact, the salience of the activation of the schematic information summarized in

the cause-relation and affected-relation nodes might partially be the result of the relevance

of this information to syntactic processes.

This view of lexical knowledge underlies most directly syntactic research within Head-

driven Phrase Structure Grammar (see Pollard & Sag, 1987, 1994 for an introduction, and

Koenig, 1999 for a recent detailed analysis of lexical knowledge along these lines). But

several frameworks, particularly within computational linguistics, assume such an

organization of lexical knowledge (see Briscoe, Copestake, & de Paiva, 1993 for a

survey). It is not crucial to our analysis of the factors which determine lexical encoding of

participant information that lexical knowledge be truly encoded in the mental lexicon in

the form of an inheritance network. As Rumelhart and Todd (1993) show, an organization

of knowledge very similar, if not isomorphic to, semantic networks may emerge out of a

distributed representational system. What is crucial for our hypothesis regarding lexical

encoding of participant information is that upon encountering a word, readers and hearers

access a vast amount of semantic and syntactic information which is not encapsulated, but

rather shared across words. In such a model, lexical encoding means that the information

accessed/activated upon the recognition of a word includes information about categories

to which the word belongs. Lexical encoding of participant information thus reduces to

semantic categories accessed/activated upon word recognition. This model leads us to

propose that two criteria affect lexical encoding (and thus determine the semantic

argument status of a participant role), semantic obligatoriness and semantic specificity.

The first criterion selects participant categories that are present in all situations described

by a verb lemma and that recognition of a verb is likely to activate. The second criterion

selects participant categories that are most relevant to the meaning and syntactic properties

of a verb lemma and that recognition of a verb is also likely to activate.

3.1. Obligatoriness

If a type of participant is required by the class of situations described by a verb,

information relative to this participant is activated upon recognition of the verb. Put

otherwise, the semantic representation of a verb is linked to semantic classes which

characterize the properties of obligatory participants (through a set of features or

microfeatures). In more formal terms, the Semantic Obligatoriness Criterion (SOC) can be

stated as follows:

2 Note that the association between the class of transitive verbs and cause-relation and affected-relation is more

complex than that between breakcaus and cause-relation. Whereas the meaning of the transitive version of break

(breakcaus) is a subtype of causal relations (cause-relation), causal relations (cause-relation) are not a subtype of

transitive verbs (transitive-verb).

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 71

Semantic Obligatoriness Criterion (SOC): If r is an argument participant role of

predicate P, then any situation that P felicitously describes includes the referent of the

filler of r.

The SOC has already been proposed as a criterion for argumenthood (Dowty, 1982),

but has wrongly, to us, been dismissed. It says that an argument constitutes an obligatory

participant of the eventualities described by a verb. The fact that the subject of John slept

corresponds to an argument of sleep partly stems from the fact that no sleeping event can

occur without a participant who is sleeping. But, the SOC only provides a necessary

condition on argumenthood. Location semantic dependents – more specifically those

locations we call event locations – and time semantic dependents are entailed of almost all

situations, despite the fact that they are widely believed to be adjuncts, as Bresnan (1982)

points out. For instance, if you knit, you must knit somewhere; in other words, any

situation described by the predicate corresponding to the English word knit includes a

location in which the event occurred. Thus, if the SOC is the only criterion on

argumenthood, it means that the semantic expression denoted by in his office in sentence

(3) would qualify as a semantic argument of the predicate denoted by knit.

(3) Marc knits in his office during lunch.

The same reasoning holds for semantic dependents that encode the time at or during

which an event occurred. Any situation the word knit felicitously describes must occur at a

particular interval of time. Again, if the SOC were the sole determinant of argumenthood,

the denotations of time expressions such as during lunch would qualify as semantic

arguments, a conclusion contradicting most linguists’ intuitions. This is why our notion of

lexical encoding also requires that the participant information be specific to a restricted

class of verbs. We refer to this additional requirement as the specificity criterion.

3.2. Specificity

The notion of specificity applies at two different levels of granularity, individual verbs

and semantically determined verb classes. At a fine-grained level, if a type of participant is

unique to a verb, it will be strongly activated upon recognition of that verb. At a coarse-

grained level, if a type of participant information is associated with a syntactic process

which targets a class of verbs, that information will be activated upon recognition of one of

these verbs. Readers should note that our formulation of specificity is a mixture of two

kinds of measure. While specificity is an intensional semantic information measure (a

measure of how many more general categories subsume the encoded information), class-

restrictedness is an extensional measure of how many verbs or situation types this

information fits. Of course, the two measures are correlated: more specific information is

typically true of fewer entities. Because quantifying class membership is easier than

quantifying degrees of generality of information, throughout this paper we will

consistently estimate participant information specificity by the cardinality of the class

of verbs it fits and use specificity and class-restrictedness interchangeably.

Our notion of semantic specificity is based on two observations. First, most events

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10372

occur at a certain location, at a certain time, and for the benefit of somebody. Constituents

which encode event locations, times, or beneficiaries can co-occur with most event-

denoting verbs (or nouns). In contrast, PPs expressing recipients, for example, cannot as

easily combine with verbs (or nouns). In fact, we know of no verb which can combine with

phrases which express recipients but not with phrases which express beneficiaries, event

locations, and times. The set of verbs which can combine with constituents expressing

beneficiaries, event locations, or time adverbials is thus significantly larger than the set of

verbs which can combine with recipients.

Secondly, participant roles corresponding to arguments (or, that are specific) take on

additional properties for particular event-types. Consider the words sing and write, for

example. The agent of a singing event carries additional properties beyond those which

all agents (more precisely, all causal effectors) carry. One property, discussed in Dowty

(1989), is that the agent must adduct its vocal folds in any event that sing felicitously

describes. This property is clearly not true of the agent of write. Conversely, the agent

of write is required to produce written examplars of words or sentences, which is not

true of the agent of sing. The presence of obligatory, additional properties for the

agents of sing and write contrasts with the absence of verb specific properties of the

(event) location at which events of singing or writing occur. Whether one sings or

writes in one’s office, no property of the location is entailed aside from the

characteristic property of the event location role, namely the fact that the location is

where the event occurs. This difference between event locations and agents of the verbs

write or sing generalizes, we believe, to most verbs. Participants in the events

felicitously described by each verb (or restricted class of verbs) are lexically required

to bear additional properties above those characteristic of the general semantic role

they instantiate if they correspond to arguments, but not if they correspond to adjuncts.

Because providing reliable estimates of the average number and kind of additional

properties argument participant roles bear is much more difficult than estimating the

sheer number of verbs requiring those roles, we do not provide direct empirical

validation of this aspect of the notion of specificity in this paper.

Two differences between (semantically obligatory) arguments and (semantically

obligatory) adjuncts emerge from these observations: (i) adjunct participant roles are

common to most verbs; (ii) argument participant roles are lexically required to bear

additional properties aside from those which are characteristic of the role. We summarize

these two differences between (obligatory) argument roles and (obligatory) adjunct roles

by saying that argument roles are specific to both an individual event-type and a restrictive

class of event-types to which the meaning of the verb belongs. We define the Semantic

Specificity Criterion for argumenthood (hereafter, SSC) as follows:

Semantic Specificity Criterion (SSC): If r is an argument participant role of predicate

P denoted by verb V, then r is specific to V and a restricted class of verbs/events.

The hypothesis that semantic specificity correlates with lexical encoding of participant

information accords well with recent research on the nature of semantic roles and research

on the semantic basis of syntactic subcategorization. Dowty (1989), for instance, argues

that semantic roles, such as agent and patient, are the intersection of properties of

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 73

participants in the described situations shared among a set of verbs. To use his

terminology, semantic role types (our participant roles) are categories of individual

roles, where the latter are defined as all the necessary properties of a given

participant in a situation-type. For example, the individual role of writer consists of

the properties all writers bear; similarly, the individual role of singer consists of the

properties all singers bear. The participant role of agent (assuming for now there is

such a role), on the other hand, is defined as the intersection of the properties of

writers, singers, and so forth. The fact that participants in events bear roles of

various grain size (from the most specific individual roles to the most general

semantic roles types) plays an important part in delineating a verb’s meaning and

the argument status of its participant roles.

To illustrate the role individual participant roles (more generally, finer-grained roles

than semantic roles) play in distinguishing verb meaning, let’s again compare sing and

write. Information relative to the agent and patient participants of sing must include

information which pertains to the singer and what is sung, not just the properties they

share with all agents and patients. That its agent must adduct its vocal cords is part of

what makes an eventuality an event of singing rather than of writing. By contrast, the

properties of the location in which singing events occur does not help distinguish the

meaning of sing from that of write. Let’s call A, P, and L the sets of properties which

the agent, patient, and location participants of any singing event bear. The sets A and

P on the one hand, and L on the other, differ in one crucial respect. Whereas the sets

A and P include properties which help distinguish the meaning of sing from that of

other words (the singer adducts his/her vocal cords, the product of the activity is

audible, …), the set L does not include such properties. In other words, A and P

contain members which are not part of the corresponding sets for write, knit, and so

forth. In contrast, all members of L are shared with most, if not all verbs (in particular,

with the corresponding set for write, knit, and so forth). They are properties of all

spatial locations in which eventualities occur, whatever their type. The SSC posits that

this difference between the sets A and P, on the one hand, and L, on the other, is

crucial to lexical encoding of schematic participant information.3

Our specificity criterion also accords well with current research on the interface

between lexical semantics and syntax which holds that the predictability of the syntactic

realization of semantic dependents must make reference to event- or verb-classes (see

Davis & Koenig, 2000; Goldberg, 1995; Jackendoff, 1990; Levin, 1993; Levin &

Rappaport-Hovav, 1995; Pinker, 1989; Van Valin & Lapolla, 1997; Wechsler, 1995

among others). This research has shown that reference to classes of verbs which are

defined semantically (by the similarity of the event-type their members denote) is critical

to the statement of the constraints which relate (1) semantic and syntactic dependents

(so-called linking constraints) and (2) the variants of verbs with multiple subcategorization

3 The relevance of participant role specificity to the individuation of verb meaning has an intriguing parallel in

the notion of term specificity in document retrieval research. The more documents a query term appears in, the

less characteristic of any document it is and, therefore, the more likely it is that a query that contains it will return

irrelevant documents (Sparck-Jones, 1972). Similarly, the more verb meanings a participant role must be part of,

the less characteristic of any of these verbs’ meanings it is (see also Resnick, 1999).

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10374

frame possibilities (so-called valence alternations). Our claim that the distinction between

argument and adjunct roles is sensitive to the size of the class of verbs whose meanings

include this role is a natural extension of this research. Building on the observation that

linking constraints and valence alternation conditions which target participant roles do not

indiscriminately apply to most verbs, but only to the restricted class of verbs whose

meanings include that role, we hypothesize that a participant role is treated as an argument

of a verb only if it targets a restrictive class of verbs, that is, if the participant role is not

true of the denotation of most verbs.

3.3. The Lexical Encoding Hypothesis

We summarize our hypothesis regarding lexical encoding of participant roles as

follows:

Lexical Encoding Hypothesis (LEH): A participant role is a (semantic) argument of a

verb if and only if it satisfies both the SOC and SSC, that is, if its presence is required of

all situations described by that verb and if it is required of the denotation of only a

restricted set of verbs.

Three points are worth noting regarding the LEH. First, our hypothesis is that semantic

specificity and obligatoriness determine the set of lexically encoded semantic arguments.

Whether all semantic arguments are syntactically active arguments – what most scholars

call arguments simpliciter – depends on the form of the verb (see the contrast between

middles and passives discussed in Mauner & Koenig, 2000). Second, arguments are

required to meet two conditions. Hence participant roles can be non-arguments or adjuncts

for either of two reasons. They are either not obligatory or they are not specific to a

restricted class of verbs. As we discuss in the next section, one can indeed find examples of

all four combinations of the two factors we have isolated (^obligatory and ^specific).

Third, the LEH is, strictly speaking, an hypothesis about factors that determine the lexical

encoding of participant information, not of what underlies all notions of argument that one

may find in the literature. This last point has important consequences for the interpretation

of our experimental evidence. What this evidence suggests is that participant roles which

satisfy the conditions of the LEH behave as if they were lexically encoded and are

therefore arguments by the definition of argument we gave in the introduction. But, we do

not know whether all lexically encoded participants behave the same. First, semantically

and syntactically obligatory participant roles might behave differently from semantically

obligatory, but syntactically optional roles. Second, some roles (causes or affected entities,

or those that Langacker (1987) calls participants) might be more cognitively salient than

others (participant locations or those that Langacker (1987) calls settings). Any or all of

these additional factors might lead to behavioral differences among the set of lexically

encoded participant roles. We leave the study of these possible further differences for

future research.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 75

4. A quantitative survey of the English verbal lexicon

4.1. Confirming the SSC

According to our two semantic criteria, participants that are arguments should be

both semantically obligatory and associated with restricted classes of verbs. In

contrast, participants corresponding to adjuncts are associated with most verbs or are

not semantically obligatory. In this section, we present the results of a

comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon that suggests that these two

criteria allow us to quantitatively and empirically define notions similar or identical

to those on which linguists have intuitively relied to characterize the differential

behavior of participant roles.

In order to gather a reliable estimate of how many verbs lexically require various

participant roles, we had three pairs of raters determine which verbs require or do not

require various participant properties for each verb they knew out of a list of 6100

verbs obtained from the MRC psycholinguistics database (see Coltheart, 1981). Each

pair judged a different set of participant roles. The initial list contained all irregular

verb forms as well as a number of exclusively British entries. Once the non-base forms

of irregular verbs and exclusively British entries were excluded and the remaining

items were cross-referenced with the American Heritage Dictionary (3rd edition), 5542

verbs remained. (A few verbs which were in the American Heritage Dictionary, but not

in the MRC database were added. It is likely that the American Heritage Dictionary

includes a few additional verbs of very low frequency.) Raters were Linguistics

graduate students and a research technician working in the Psycholinguistics

laboratory. All raters received extensive instructions on how to assess lexical

entailments that define various participant roles. Our surveys made an important

simplifying assumption. We counted verbs on the basis of their morphological identity:

all senses of a lemma counted as one entry in our database. This decision had the

following consequence. When a verb had several entries, only one of which entailed

the presence of a given participant role, the verb was marked as requiring this

participant role. Thus, the verb hide was marked as requiring an obligatory participant

location (the location where the pictures end up in sentence (4a)), although it only

requires one in the use illustrated in sentence (4a), not in the one illustrated in sentence

(4b).

(4) a. Bill hid many compromising pictures in his desk, (while) at school.

b. Sue does not want her children to hide their feelings from her.

Each rater independently determined whether each verb had at least one sense which

required the presence of a participant bearing a certain participant property, and if not, if it

had at least one sense which allowed the presence of a participant bearing a certain

participant property. Rater pairs also met to resolve any differences in the criteria they

applied in assessing whether a verb required or allowed a given participant role.

Disagreements fell into three categories: (1) raters disagreed on whether two uses of a verb

constituted one or two distinct verb senses; (2) one rater of a rater pair failed to imagine a

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10376

context of use in which a verb did not require the presence of a participant bearing a certain

property; (3) raters simply disagreed on whether a verb could be used in a given context.

After the first two kinds of disagreement were resolved, only a small proportion of true

disagreements were left.

4.2. Rating study 1: agent roles

In our first survey, one pair of raters judged agent roles because they are the most

undisputed of argument types and are likely to be the most frequently occurring of

argument categories. For each verb raters had to answer the following questions, shown in

example (5), which correspond to the three most important proto-Agent properties

mentioned in Dowty (1991):4

(5) a. CAUSAL FORCE: Does the verb describe situations which must, can, or cannot

include a participant or force that causes a change of state (e.g. Marc in Marc finally

cooked the fish)?

b. INTENTIONALITY: Does the verb describe situations which must, can, or cannot

include a participant who is volitionally involved in the situation (e.g. Martha in

Martha jogged last night)?

c. NOTION: Does the verb describe situations which must, can, or cannot include a

participant who has a mental representation of another participant in the situation

(e.g. Marc in Marc thought of the beach)?

Our motivation for assessing whether described situation-types must include a

participant bearing properties such as causality, volition, and having a notion of another

participant, rather than whether the described situation-types simply required the presence

of an agent, is based on semantic considerations. Although the term agent is sometimes

used in the literature to cover participants that bear any of the three properties we

examined (or even a larger number), there is no semantic correlate of that use of the term

agent. It is merely a cover term for a disjunction of semantic categories (agents are

volitional entities or causers or cognizers …). To the extent this disjunction does not

represent a semantically natural class it does not serve to specify a coherent class of verb

meanings and is not a participant role, semantically.5 Furthermore, even if the label agent

had some semantic unity, the fact that we distinguish subtypes of agents (but not, of say,

event locations or times) that are restricted to relatively small classes of verbs counts as

evidence that, all else being equal, agents (and not event locations or time) are arguments.

This is because the existence of recognizable subcategories of a participant role is what

makes that role useful for distinguishing one verb meaning from another. Finally, the fact

that some of these properties are specifically targeted by grammatical constructions (e.g.

intentionality is required of the controller of the unexpressed subject of rationale clauses,

4 Because we follow Dowty (1989) and assume semantic roles are defined through necessary properties shared

by participants in situations described by verbs, we will talk interchangeably of agent roles or agent properties.5 Dowty (1991) discusses the grouping of the properties listed in (5) for interfacing the lexical semantics of

verbs and their co-occurrence properties. But, crucially, he does not discuss the grouping on semantic grounds

per se.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 77

as shown by the ungrammaticality of *John collapsed to wake his mother up) suggests the

grammatical relevance of individual entailments and further justifies the selection of this

semantic grain-size. For these reasons, we believe that the semantically consistent

participant properties listed in (5) should be tabulated independently when assessing the

degree to which our LEH matches traditional, intuitive classifications of arguments; thus

Table 1 tabulates each agent property separately.

In computing the percentage of verbs whose semantics require that a participant bear a

certain property, we considered verbs which were known by one pair of raters, i.e. 3909

verbs in all.

As Table 1 shows, agent properties target between 15% and 30% of verbs known to

college-educated English speakers. Because the various agent properties are the most

frequent arguments, we can use them as a rough estimate of an upper limit for the

specificity hypothesis. Our results on the selective nature of agent properties (they are

required to be true of less than a third of lemmas) accord well with the restrictiveness

of a few valence alternations in both English and French. The English ditransitive

alternation targets about 5% of the verbs known to college-educated speakers (A.

Goldberg, p.c.), while the French inchoative and dative predication alternations target

about 16% and 2%, respectively, of the verbs known to college-educated speakers

(Koenig, 1994). Like required agent properties, valence alternations semantically target

a restricted set of verbs.

4.3. Rating study 2: time, locations, instrument, and beneficiary

With this upper limit of class-size in hand, we exhaustively examined the English

verbal lexicon for five additional participant properties. The surveys of these five

properties involved two different pairs of raters, one pair for beneficiary, instrument, and

time, another for participant and event locations. As was the case for Study 1, each rater

independently determined whether each verb had at least one sense which required the

presence of a participant bearing a certain participant property, and if not, if it had at least

one sense which allowed the presence of a participant bearing a certain participant

property. We chose to contrast those participant properties which are widely held to be

adjunctive in nature (event location, time, and beneficiaries) and those syntactically

optional participant properties which pass some traditional tests of argumenthood and are

therefore sometimes classified as arguments or quasi-arguments (e.g. semantically

Table 1

Percentages of verbs judged to require or allow various agent roles

Agent property Verbs requiring role Verbs allowing role

Causal force 29.8 18.1

Volition 23.6 70.8

Notion 14.2 71.5

All inter-rater agreements were above 99%. Since a single participant can bear more than one property (e.g.

about 3% of verbs describe events which include participants that are both causal forces and volitionally

involved), the percentages do not sum to 100%.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10378

obligatory instruments and participant locations).6 The argument status of instruments is

controversial. Some linguists treat instruments as adjuncts on the basis of the fact that

instruments do not participate in valence alternations in English (see Carlson &

Tanenhaus, 1988) or that they are syntactically optional (see Dowty, 1989). Others argue

on the basis of several syntactic criteria that instruments behave like arguments or quasi-

arguments and differ from event locations or time participants (see Schutze, 1995; Van

Valin & Lapolla, 1997). It is possible that the inconclusiveness of previous studies stems

from treating instruments as a unified category and from not recognizing the existence of

two classes of verbs, those which allow, but do not require the presence of instruments in

denoted situations and those which do require their presence. Consider the contrast

between the verbs chop and eat. Chop describes situations which must include an

instrument; in contrast, eat describes situations which can, but do not necessarily, include

an instrument. The SSC predicts that syntactically optional participant roles which pattern

syntactically with arguments (i.e. obligatory instruments and participant locations) will be

required of the denotations of less than 30% of English verbs whereas syntactically

optional participant roles which do not pattern syntactically like arguments (event

locations and time) will be required of the denotations of significantly more than 30% of

English verbs. Finally, we also compared event locations and times to the seldom

discussed category of participant locations (i.e. of locations which indicate where a

participant in the event is or ends up) which are exemplified by the PPs in her notebook and

in his desk in sentences (6a) and (6b), respectively. Participant locations meet many of the

syntactic criteria which Schutze (1995) uses to argue that instruments behave like

arguments.

(6) a. Johanna wrote the address in her notebook, (while) in her office.

b. Bill hid many compromising pictures in his desk, (while) at school.

One pair of raters assessed which verbs require, allow, or exclude a time participant, an

instrument participant, or a beneficiary participant by answering the following questions:

(7) a. INSTRUMENT: Does the verb describe situations in which one participant must,

can, or cannot use another participant to perform an action (e.g. Marc poked the frog

requires Marc to have used something)?

b. TIME: Does the verb describe situations which must, can, or cannot occur at a

certain time interval (e.g. the time of the writing in Marc wrote down the address)?

c. BENEFICIARY: Does the verb describe situations which must, can, or cannot be

performed for the benefit of someone or something? (e.g. Mary in Marc cooked a

wonderful dinner for Mary)?

A second pair of raters assessed which verbs require, allow or exclude an event location

participant or a participant location participant, by answering the following questions:

6 Although traditional (syntactic) criteria are not reliable for determining the argument status of a participant

role, we use the fact that, as Schutze (1995) suggests, not all syntactically optional participant roles behave

identically to assess the role the SSC plays in discriminating between participant categories whose participant

status has traditionally been problematic.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 79

(8) a. EVENT LOCATION: Does the verb describe situations which include a location in

which all the participants must, can, or cannot be located and in which the event

as a whole takes place (e.g. the location in which the writing occurs in Marc wrote the

address)?

b. PARTICIPANT LOCATION: Does the verb describe situations which must, can, or

cannot include a location in which one, but not necessarily all participants are

(e.g. the notebook in Martha wrote down the address in her notebook)?

As was the case for the rating of agent properties, raters were given several examples of

each category. But because the categories of instruments and participant locations were

not as well-known, our raters were also given instructions on how to resolve difficult cases.

For instruments, body-parts could count as instruments only if objects other than body-

parts could be used as instruments as well (thus, mouth is not an instrument of eating,

according to this definition) and causally responsible entities in intermediate causal events

that do not differ from the ultimate causally responsible entity did not count as instruments

(thus, Bob is not the instrument of the event denoted by the by-phrase in Bob persuaded

Billy to wash the dishes by suggesting he would not otherwise go to the ballgame).

Similarly, explicit instructions were given to cover difficult cases involving participant

and event locations. In particular, to count as an event location all participants had

to be in that location during the entire duration of the event. Thus, because John, in John

abandoned Bill on the island, is present on the island at the initial but not final interval of

the event, on the island was classified as a participant location. The results of the survey

are summarized in Table 2.

The percentages in Tables 1 and 2 should be considered as estimates, since, as

mentioned before, all senses of a lemma counted as one entry. Counting verb lemmas with

at least one entry that requires a particular participant role rather than directly counting

entries most probably leads to an overestimation of the percentage of verb entries whose

denotations require an obligatory participant location or an obligatory instrument. Our

motivation for simplifying our counting procedure was prompted by practical

considerations. We had no practical means of distinguishing verb senses. However, the

consequences of our misestimation do no harm to our hypothesis regarding class size,

since, if anything, it overestimates the percentage of verbs which take obligatory

instrument or participant location roles.

The results shown in Tables 1 and 2 provide empirical support for our hypothesis:

Table 2

Percentages of verbs judged to require or allow five syntactically optional participant roles

Participant role Verbs requiring role Verbs allowing role

Instruments 12 35

Event locations 98.2 0

Participant locations 7 1.5

Time 99.8 0

Beneficiary 0 94.1

All inter-rater agreements were above 92%.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10380

semantically obligatory participants, which are traditionally judged to be arguments,

co-occur with a small set of verbs (about 30% or less), whereas semantically obligatory

participants, which are traditionally judged to be adjuncts, occur with most verbs (above

90%). They are also consonant with the judgments of linguists such as Van Valin (1993)

and Schutze (1995) who treat syntactically optional, but semantically obligatory,

instruments as semi-arguments rather than adjuncts. Finally, our results suggest that the

less studied participant location role, like instruments, are semantic arguments of verbs

whose denotations require them.

Aside from confirming our class-size hypothesis, our survey results bring to the fore

several theoretical issues. For reasons of space, we only mention one here, namely the

independence of the notions of semantic obligatoriness and participant role type. Consider

the following sentences:

(9) a. The policeman poked the body (with a stick).

b. The policeman sipped his iced tea (with a straw).

Whereas the presence of an entity serving as instrument in the described event is

necessary irrespective of the presence of the with-PP in sentence (9a), the presence of an

instrument is dependent on there being a PP in sentence (9b). Thus, whereas the use of

poke illustrated in sentence (9a) requires the presence of something which the policeman

used to poke the body, the use of sip illustrated in sentence (9b) does not entail that

something was used by the policeman to sip his tea. Nonetheless, the referent of the object

of with plays the same participant role in both sentences. In other words, the verbs poke

and sip both describe events which include the same participant roles in sentences (9a) and

(9b), when they include a with instrument PP, even though only poke lexically requires

the presence of an instrument. The contrast between obligatory instruments and non-

obligatory instruments suggests that we need to (partly) dissociate the semantic type of a

participant role from its obligatoriness and that we cannot define arguments as members of

a predefined list of participant roles.

The contrast between a semantically obligatory and a semantically optional variant of a

single role type is endemic to the instrument role. As shown in Table 2, there are hundreds

of verbs which semantically require instrument participants and many more verbs that

merely allow an instrument participant in the situations they denote. Instruments thus

provide good evidence of the need to separate the issue of role type from that of semantic

obligatoriness. But, other participant roles illustrate this same contrast. Some verbs (more

precisely, verb lemmas) require that the situations they felicitously describe include

participant locations, while others merely allow their presence. Consider the following two

sentences:

(10) a. He heated the wax quickly in a small pan.

b. He boiled the water quickly in a small pan.

Whereas both locations are participant locations and not event locations (as the ability

to add an event location such as in the kitchen attests), the participation of the pan (or some

other container) is only required of boiling events; it is not required of heating events. (The

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 81

presence of the adverb quickly excludes an NP attachment interpretation of the locational

PP.) One can heat wax by letting sun’s rays hit it for an hour. The situation is similar to

what we just discussed for instruments, except that optionality is quite rare in the case of

participant locations. Very few verbs are like heat in describing situations which allow, but

do not require, participant location participant roles. The independence of semantic

obligatoriness from participant role type means that our two criteria of lexical encoding of

participant information are orthogonal: all combinations of obligatoriness and specificity

are indeed attested, as shown in Table 3.

5. Behavioral evidence for the SSC and SOC

Our survey results provide some initial confirmation for the hypothesis that semantic

obligatoriness and semantic specificity correlate with behavior traditionally deemed

symptomatic of lexical encoding. Instrument as well as participant location participants

which pass most of the (imperfect) traditional tests of argumenthood (Schutze, 1995) are

indeed specific to a restricted set of verbs and thus contrast with event location and time

participants. But these data do not provide direct evidence for the lexical encoding of this

information. The two experiments discussed in this section directly address this issue.

5.1. Experiment 1: testing the SSC

We adopted the following experimental logic to test the SSC. We assumed that

participant information that is lexically encoded is retrieved upon recognition of a word.

Because this information is activated, it is more likely to be used to continue a sentence.

This higher activation of lexically encoded information need not be reflected in higher

frequency in written texts of constituents expressing that information over participant

information which is not lexically encoded. Many other factors come into play in deciding

whether to express syntactically optional semantic information, including the relevance of

that information or its typicality. But, when explicitly asked to finish a sentence by adding

a constituent, we expect subjects to add a constituent expressing lexically encoded

participant information more often than a constituent expressing a participant that is not

lexically encoded, since, by hypothesis, only the former is activated by the recognition of

the sentence’s main verb. If the SSC is correct, we predict constituents expressing

semantically obligatory participant locations to be added: (i) more frequently after verbs

which lexically encode them than after verbs which do not lexically encode them; and (ii)

more frequently than constituents which express event locations, times, or any other

Table 3

Examples of ^specific and ^obligatory participant roles

Obligatory role Non-obligatory role

Specific role The participant location of boil; the instrument of poke The participant location of heat

Non-specific role The event location of boil The beneficiary of poke

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10382

participant information which is not lexically encoded, since only semantically obligatory

and specific participant information is activated upon recognition of verbs.

We tested these predictions in an experiment in which participants read sentences such

as those shown in (11).

(11) a. The collectible doll was advertised

b. The collectible doll was sold

The verb advertise in sentence (11a) semantically requires the denoted situations to

include both event and participant locations; that is, a location where the doll was

advertised; in contrast, sell in sentence (11b) requires the presence of an event location, but

does not permit a participant location.

5.1.1. Method

5.1.1.1. Participants. Seventy-two native English speaking undergraduates from the

University at Buffalo received partial course credit for participating in this experiment.

5.1.1.2. Materials. Thirty-six sentence pairs such as those in example (11) were

constructed (see Appendix A for a complete list of stimuli). Each pair included an

experimental sentence whose main verb semantically required both a participant location

and an event location (e.g. advertise in sentence (11a)) and an identical control sentence

except for the fact that its main verb required the presence of an event location but

did not allow a participant location (e.g. sell in sentence (11b)). Each of these

sentences allowed several continuations, as the sentences in (11) illustrate, participant

locations (e.g. in the magazine), manner adverbials (e.g. successfully), temporal adverbials

(e.g. last month), and so forth. The experimental sentences were distributed across two

presentation lists such that one member of each pair appeared on each list, and across the

two lists each pair member appeared only once. Thus, each participant saw 18 experi-

mental sentences and 18 control sentences. Sixty distractor sentences were intermixed

with experimental sentences. Like our experimental and control sentences, the 60

distractor sentences allowed multiple completions. For example, the distractor sentence

Jordan drank a soda can be followed by an instrument PP with a straw, a location PP in the

dining room, a temporal PP during dinner, a manner adverbial slowly, and so forth.

5.1.1.3. Procedure and coding. Participants were instructed to add something to the end of

each sentence that made sense and was grammatical, but without spending too much time

on any one item. Prior to conducting this study, a pilot study was conducted to determine

what categories to assign to completions (see Bienvenue, 1997). Twenty-two categories of

completions emerged. Some categories elicited very few continuations in this study and

were collapsed into a single Other category. In the end, 11 categories were used for inter-

rater reliability and statistical analysis. The assignment of completion type for experi-

mental and control items to one of these categories was performed by two raters blind to

the purpose of the study. After initially rating all the sentences, both raters met and

resolved all disagreements.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 83

5.1.2. Results

Fig. 2 presents the average percentage of completions for the experimental sentence

pairs. As the figure indicates, sentences whose main verb semantically required a

participant location elicited many more participant location completions than any other

completion type (47%). Crucially, event location phrases, the second most frequent

completion, elicited less than a fourth as many responses (11%).7 Four separate x 2

analyses were conducted on the summed number of completions across all items and all

participants. The first showed that verbs semantically requiring a participant location

elicited more participant location completions than expected by chance (since there were

11 continuation categories – the Ungrammatical category being excluded – chance was

defined as 100% 4 11 ¼ 9:1%) for experimental items (x2ð11Þ ¼ 58:12, P , 0:001), but

not control items (x2ð11Þ ¼ 0:11, P . 0:05). The second indicated that verbs semantically

requiring a participant location elicited more participant location than event location

completions (and a fortiori other completions, since event location phrases were

the second most frequent type of completion) for experimental items (x2ð11Þ ¼ 41:01,

P , 0:001), but not for controls (x2ð11Þ ¼ 0:95, P . 0:1). The third indicated that verbs

semantically requiring a participant location elicited more participant location

completions than verbs that do not (x2ð1Þ ¼ 4:21, P , 0:05). The fourth indicated that

completions did not differ across experimental and control items for any other categories,

since they did not differ for the category with the second largest difference score, manner

(x2ð1Þ ¼ 1:23, P . 0:1).

5.1.3. Discussion

The results of this study suggest that participant location verbs, which semantically

require participant locations, are highly associated with participant location roles or

include in their representation a participant location role. But the same verbs are not highly

associated with event location participant roles or do not include in their representation an

event location role, despite the fact that they semantically require them. The SSC explains

this difference: event locations are not specific to a restricted class of verbs and are thus not

7 As a reviewer pointed out, it is surprising that there was 11% (139 out of 1296) of participant location

completions for control items which were meant to include verbs that did not allow a participant location. Several

factors contributed to this unexpectedly high percentage. First, some continuations which were classified as

participant continuations were actually instances of PP modifiers extraposed from the subject position. Second,

some continuations classified as participant locations required the passive verb to receive either an adjectival or

result passive interpretation. Since such interpretations involve only the “patient” participant, the location

continuations are actually event locations. Both of these misclassifications involved difficult linguistic judgments

which we had not anticipated and which our raters were not trained to make. Third, some continuations classified

as participant location continuations followed a particle that changed the verb lemma involved (for example,

many participant location continuations followed the addition of the preposition over after turn). All in all, after

these continuations were removed, only 5.1% of true participant location continuations remained. Two-thirds of

these followed verbs that were rated as allowing participant locations by at least one of our English verbal lexicon

survey raters. Given that at least one of our survey raters had judged the verbs as allowing participant locations,

the presence of participant location completions is not that surprising. The remaining 1.7% of true participant

location completions involved verbs that neither of our survey raters judged to allow participant locations.

All such continuations involved infrequent uses of the control verbs which raters in our survey simply did

not anticipate (13 of these remaining 22 completions, for example, followed the verb tested, as in The new

memory was tested on the latest computer on the market.).

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10384

highly associated with – or specific to – any verb. By contrast, participant locations are

semantically obligatory for only a fraction of the English verbal lexicon and thus are

highly associated with these verbs. Although these results support the SSC, a competing

explanation is that the obtained differences are not due to a semantic contrast between

experimental and control verbs or between purported arguments and adjuncts, but rather to

the sheer surface frequency of PPs expressing the various participant properties.

According to this competing hypothesis, participant locations constitute more frequent

continuations than event locations, simply because participant location verbs syntactically

co-occur more frequently with PPs which express such participant roles than with PPs

which express event locations. Of course, this competing hypothesis does not explain the

source of differences in PPs surface frequencies. We surmise that differences in lexical

encoding of schematic participant information play a role in the frequency of occurrence

of PPs which express that information.

To assess the plausibility of this competing hypothesis, we searched the Brown corpus

for occurrences of participant location verbs and control verbs, and counted the number of

times each verb occurred with various PPs. Numbers of occurrences of these PPs across

experimental and control verbs are summarized in Table 4. Present in the table refers to

the number of times the verb did co-occur with a given PP category; possible refers to the

number of times each verb occurred in a use that, by the judgments of our raters licensed

the occurrence of a particular kind of PP, although none co-occurred with the verb in the

Fig. 2. Percentages of completions of various semantic types for participant location and control verbs

(chance ¼ 9:1%).

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 85

Brown corpus. For example, in the Brown corpus sentence And he would sleep, sleep does

not co-occur with a PP expressing a participant location, but our raters thought it could

(e.g. in his chair can be added). We chose as the denominator for each participant role the

number of times a verb occurs in the Brown corpus in a use that licenses the occurrence of

a PP expressing that role (possible in Table 4) rather than simply the number of times a

verb occurs in the Brown corpus for the following reason. Many verbs have some uses

which do not license the expression as a PP of a particular kind of participant role.

Including all uses of a verb in the denominator would have therefore unduly reduced the

chances of finding a correlation, as the percentages of occurrence of PPs expressing any

participant role would have been rather small when compared to all uses of the verb in the

corpus. By choosing a smaller denominator, we increased the likelihood of finding a

correlation that would be counter to the experimental hypothesis. Because control verbs

were not predicted to allow participant locations to occur, Table 4 groups together

participant locations and stationary locations into a location supercategory. (Note that

since more than one optional PP can co-occur with any given verb, the percentages do not

sum up to 100%.)

We conducted two correlation analyses on the labeled corpus data. First, we examined

whether there was a correlation between the percentage of times a verb occurred with a PP

expressing any location (directional or non-directional) in the Brown corpus and whether

the verb denoted situations that included a participant location. A significant correlation

(rð48Þ ¼ 0:561, P , 0:01) was indeed found across all items between location

occurrences in the Brown corpus and location completions in our study. (Items with

fewer than four occurrences in the corpus were excluded, leaving 25 pairs from the

original 36.) Second, we examined whether the percentage of participant location

continuations for a participant location verb was correlated with the percentage of times

each verb co-occurred with a PP expressing a participant location in the Brown corpus.

We found that the correlation was not significant, and moreover, was negative

(rð23Þ ¼ 20:192, P ¼ 0:36). The scatterplot in Fig. 3 illustrates this second analysis.

The presence of a correlation in the first analysis suggests that syntactic co-occurrence

frequencies might indeed be part of what underlies the increase in location completions for

participant location verbs. But, the absence of a correlation in the second analysis militates

against assuming that all of the effect observed in our continuation study can be attributed

to co-occurrence frequencies. How frequently a participant location verb co-occurs with a

PP expressing a participant location in the Brown corpus is not a good predictor of the

Table 4

Percentages of occurrence of syntactically optional PPs in the Brown corpus grouped by semantic role for

participant location verbs and control verbs in Experiment 1

Inst Loc Src Goal Path Rec Ben Temp Rat Man

% present/possible (participant location verbs) 0.5 24.2 2.9 37.8 25 7.7 0.8 4.1 2.8 2.6

% present/possible (control verbs) 1.1 5.9 6.1 17.9 7.1 22.7 0.8 5.6 2.3 2.8

Inst, instrument; Loc, locations; Src, source; Rec, recipient; Ben, beneficiary; Temp, temporal; Rat, rationale;

Man, manner.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10386

percentage of completions this verb received in our continuation study. Note that it is not

particularly surprising that we found a difference between the frequency of expression of

syntactically optional semantic arguments in our continuation studies and in (non-

laboratory generated) ordinary texts (in particular, that participant locations occurred more

frequently as completions than in the corpus). As we noted earlier, the fact that a verb

lexically encodes a syntactically optional semantic participant but another does not is no

guarantee that speakers or writers will express that semantic participant more often with

the former. Multiple factors influence the expression of syntactically optional semantic

arguments, including (i) the verb specific restrictiveness of the selectional constraints on

fillers of that participant role (see Resnik, 1997) or (ii) the discourse role that this filler will

play (see Givon, 1984). These lexical and discourse factors can override any difference in

the rate of PP expression. In contrast, our experimental participants were explicitly asked

to provide continuations and thereby express syntactically optional phrases. We

hypothesize that in such a situation the aforementioned factors for not expressing

participant information are severely attenuated, such that the importance of the lexical

encoding of participant information becomes more important.

Overall, the results of our corpus study suggest that (i) surface co-occurrence with

locations partly underlies the higher rate of location completions for verbs which require

them than for verbs which do not require them, but (ii) the results of the continuation study

cannot be entirely attributed to surface co-occurrence information, since the corpus

frequency of co-occurrence of a participant location verb with a participant location

constituent in the Brown corpus does not correlate with the frequency with which

participants completed an experimental item containing that verb with a constituent

expressing a participant location.

Fig. 3. Scatterplot of the correlation between percentage of a participant location post-verbal constituent in the

Brown corpus and percentage of participant location completion for experimental items.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 87

5.2. Experiment 2: testing the SOC

Our second study was conducted to determine whether differences in the semantic

obligatoriness of participant information that is associated with syntactically optional

constituents has an immediate influence on parsing. A large number of studies have

provided evidence, in the form of processing disruptions, for the early use of lexically-

encoded syntactic and semantic information associated with the required constituents of

verbs in the processing of filler-gap sentences (Boland, 1997; Boland & Tanenhaus, 1990;

Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1989; Clifton & Frazier, 1989; Crain & Fodor,

1985; Stowe, 1986; Stowe, Tanenhaus, & Carlson, 1991; Tanenhaus, Boland, Mauner, &

Carlson, 1993; Tanenhaus & Carlson, 1989; Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Boland, 1990;

Traxler & Pickering, 1996). We reasoned that the sensitivity of verbs to co-occurring

constituents that are syntactically obligatory and express lexically encoded participant

information might also extend to lexically encoded participant information that is only

optionally expressed. To test this hypothesis, we compared the processing of sentences

whose main verbs, according to the results of our participant property survey, either

semantically required (e.g. behead in sentences (12a) and (12c)), or merely permitted (e.g.

kill in sentences (12b) and (12d)) an instrument participant in the events they described.

(12) a. Which sword | did the rebels | behead | the traitor king with [ ] | during the

rebellion?

b. Which sword | did the rebels | kill | the traitor king with [ ] | during the

rebellion?

c. With which sword | did the rebels | behead the traitor king [ ] | during the

rebellion?

d. With which sword | did the rebels | kill the traitor king [ ] | during the

rebellion?

The logic of this filler-gap paradigm depends on there being a WH-filler that has been

extracted from an indirect object position that is, in addition, syntactically or semantically

inappropriate as a sentence’s direct object. When a reader encounters the verb in a sentence like

(12a) or (12b), they should experience processing difficulty if they attempt to integrate the filler

into the developing sentence representation as a direct object, which they are likely to do unless

the verb provides some semantic or syntactic evidence that the filler could be plausibly

associated with an indirect object gap. We compared the processing offiller-gap sentences with

NP WH-fillers (e.g. (12a) and (12b)) to control sentences whose WH-fillers included a

preposition (e.g. (12c) and (12d)) which provided readers with clear syntactic evidence that the

WH-filler could not be a direct object of the verb. Assuming that processing involves constraint-

satisfaction, we expect the ease of integration of the filler to be affected both by the presence of

syntactic evidence of the role of the filler (which the preposition in the PP filler conditions

provides) and the presence of lexical information as to the semantic role of the filler (which the

verb in the behead conditions provides). In other words, we expect PP filler sentences to be

easier to process than NP filler sentences, since the preposition provides readers with useful

information about the semantic role of the filler (with is often associated with an instrument

role). We also expect verbs that semantically require an instrument to be easier to process than

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10388

verbs that do not require an instrument, at least if our LEH is correct. Other things being equal,

we would expect an interaction between filler and verb types. But other factors can obscure that

interaction. In particular, whether an interaction is found depends on two factors: (i) the

respective size of the processing penalty incurred for the absence of syntactic vs. lexical

evidence of the filler’s semantic role; and (ii) the size of the increased benefit that the syntactic

cue provides because of its earlier occurrence (five word positions prior to the lexical evidence).

Since we do not currently have any way of assessing either factor, our predictions in this paper

focus instead on region specific main effects. Because filler-gap studies using verbs which

subcategorize for more than a direct object (i.e. dative and object control verbs) typically find

anomaly effects not at the main verb but rather at the next word position (c.f. discussion in

Tanenhaus et al., 1993), we predicted that our filler-gap sentences, which optionally sub-

categorize for a PP, would also elicit anomaly effects at the region immediately following the

main verb. In particular, we expect to see effects of both syntactic and lexical cues at this region.

5.2.1. Method

5.2.1.1. Participants. A total of 105 native English speaking undergraduates from the

University at Buffalo participated in this experiment for partial course credit. Data from

five participants were omitted from analyses because they did not meet an 85% accuracy

criterion on comprehension questions.

5.2.1.2. Materials. Twenty-four sentence quadruples such as those in example (12) were

constructed (see Appendix A for a complete list of stimuli). Each quadruple included a pair

of sentences whose main verb was hypothesized to semantically require an instrument

(e.g. behead in sentences (12a) and (12c)) while the main verb shared by the other pair

permitted but did not require an instrument participant (e.g. kill in sentences (12b) and

(12d)). Within each of these pairs of sentences sharing a verb, one sentence began with an

NP WH-filler. The filler was syntactically possible as either a direct object or indirect

object, but was semantically appropriate only as the indirect object of the stranded

preposition with. The other sentence within each pair began with a PP WH-filler that was

syntactically impossible as a direct object and thus must be associated with a later indirect

object gap. To avoid obscuring expected effects with end-of-sentence wrap-up effects (Just

& Carpenter, 1987), all sentences included a sentence-final prepositional or adverbial

phrase. Aside from the verb and filler type (NP or PP), the content of the sentences within a

quadruple was identical. For presentation and analysis, sentences were segmented into five

regions which are indicated by the vertical bars (|) in example (12).

The 24 experimental sentences were counterbalanced across four presentation lists in a

latin square. Because of an error in counterbalancing, two conditions on each presentation

list had five stimulus sentences while the other two conditions had seven stimulus

sentences. Despite this imbalance, there was no overall effect of list (F1ð3; 96Þ ¼ 0:58,

P ¼ 0:63; F2ð3; 16Þ ¼ 0:68, P ¼ 0:57). Experimental sentences were intermixed with 72

distractor sentences. To prevent participants from developing systematic processing

strategies based on surface characteristics that might be associated with experimental

items, these distractor sentences were all sentences that took the form of other types

of questions including Yes-No questions with various types of auxiliary verbs, and

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 89

WH-questions in which the filler could be a bare WH-word (e.g. Who or What), a WH-PP filler

(e.g. At what time), a WH-NP filler (e.g. What color shirt), or a quantifier phrase WH filler (e.g.

How many apples). WH-fillers in distractor sentences were extracted from both pre- and post-

verbal argument positions and adjunct positions. Thus, they expressed a wide variety of

participant roles. Distractor sentences were segmented into presentation regions in a fashion

similar to that of experimental items. For 32 distractor sentences, comprehension questions

were constructed to make sure that participants were comprehending the stimulus sentences.

For half of these questions, the correct answer was Yes. Comprehension questions queried

readers about what a distractor sentence was asking or about the plausibility of a particular

answer. For example, for the distractor sentence When is the repairman coming to fix the

refrigerator? the comprehension question was Is last Monday a possible answer?

Materials selected as stimulus sentences were extensively normed. We conducted two

types of plausibility norming studies, one norming study for grammaticality, and a corpora

study. The first norming study evaluated a set of WH-fillers that had been generated by the

experimenters and a separate group of participants for their plausibility as instruments of

behead and kill verb sentence pairs following the norming procedure outlined in McRae,

Ferretti, and Amyote (1996). Participants were asked to rate, on a 7-point Likert scale, how

likely each of a set of participant- and experimenter-generated NP fillers were as instruments

of active declarative behead and kill verb sentences (7, highly likely; 1, highly unlikely).

Participants rated the likelihood of these fillers for active declarative versions of experimental

sentences in which the object of the preposition was left blank (e.g. The rebel knight beheaded/

killed the traitorous king with __ during the rebellion.). For each pair of kill and behead verb

sentences, the NP filler selected had a mean rating that was above the mean for all of the fillers

that had been generated for a pair. This mean rating was always above the midpoint on the

Likert scale. Moreover, whenever a selected NP’s rating for kill and behead members of a

sentence frame differed, this difference never exceeded 0.55 points on the Likert scale and the

selected NP was rated as more plausible in the kill verb member of a sentence pair for 63% of

the items. Mean plausibility ratings for NP instrument fillers for behead and kill verb sentences

were 5.89 (SE ¼ 0:13) and 5.94 (SE ¼ 0:14), respectively.

Another group of participants rated the selected NPs for their plausibility as direct objects

of kill and behead verbs in active declarative versions of filler-gap sentences like The rebel

knight beheaded/killed the __ during the rebellion on a 7-point Likert scale with the same

anchors as in the previous study. All of the selected NP fillers received low plausibility ratings

as direct objects (behead: M ¼ 1:91 (SE ¼ 0:17), kill: M ¼ 1:97 (SE ¼ 0:15)).

A third norming study examined the grammaticality of behead and kill verb sentences with

NP and PP fillers. This study was conducted to prospectively rule out the possibility that

differences between kill and behead verbs could be attributed to putative violations of island

constraints rather than to differences in the argument structures of behead and kill verbs. Note

that this possibility is only a concern if one subscribes to the view that any constituent that

corresponds to an argument of a verb must be subcategorized for.8 Under this assumption, a

concern arises regarding our materials. Our sentences involve WH-movement of putative

arguments and adjuncts whose semantic status could be reflected syntactically as differences

8 We do not subscribe to this view and in fact argue that a participant’s argument and subcategory status are

only weakly correlated, at least for syntactically optional constituents.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10390

in subcategory frames for behead and kill verbs. Under this view, the extraction of an NP from

a PP adjunct WH-filler (e.g. (12b)) should result in an island constraint violation while

extraction of the same NP from a PP argument WH-filler (e.g. (12a)) should not (Chomsky,

1986; Huang, 1982). Thus, if sentences such as (12b) elicit anomaly effects relative to their PP

controls and sentences such as (12a) do not, this could be attributed to differences in their

respective syntactic grammaticality rather than argument status of NP fillers.

The guiding assumption underlying this norming study was that any grammatical violation

should reliably elicit a judgment of ungrammaticality. Many types of extractions that have

been identified as examples of island violation phenomena elicit judgments of ungrammati-

cality and do so quite palpably (e.g. extraction from WH-islands as in Who does John

wonder why Lisa likes __? or Complex-NP islands as in What do you believe the claim

that Lisa bought__?). Note that in contrast to these examples, it is difficult to discern much

difference in the acceptability of our experimental sentences with putative argument (12a) and

adjunct (12b) extractions. Of course, the greater unacceptability of extractions from WH- and

Complex-NP islands could be the result of more than one grammatical constraint being

violated. But note that at least intuitively, extraction from a putative adjunct PP like (12b) is far

more acceptable than a subject–verb agreement (SVA) violation (e.g. The key for the

cabinets are on the table), which arguably violates only one constraint.

We confirmed these intuitive judgments by asking participants to rate experimental

sentences like those shown in (12a)–(12d) and sentences with SVA violations and extractions

from WH- and Complex-NP islands like those illustrated above on a 7-point Likert scale in

which the anchors 1 and 7 were described respectively as sentences of English that you would

be either highly unlikely or highly likely to hear or read. The results of this study are

summarized in Table 5. WH-island violations were rated significantly lower than either

Complex-NP or SVA violations (Ps , 0:002). Crucially, grammaticality ratings to sentences

with NP fillers did not differ from each other or from their PP controls. In contrast, NP filler

arguments, which received the lowest rating of our experimental sentences, were rated as

significantly better than SVA violations, the category of clear grammatical violation that

received the highest acceptability ratings (P , 0:0001). Given these results, it is unlikely that

any awkwardness that is sometimes associated with sentences with extractions from adjunct

PPs like (12b) is due to island violations.

Finally, we conducted a corpora study to examine the possibility that any differences we

might observe in the processing of behead and kill verb sentences with NP fillers relative to

their controls could be due to the frequency with which behead and kill verbs co-occur with

with þ instrument phrases. For each verb, we computed the proportion of with þ instrument

phrases which occurred with behead and kill verbs in the combined Brown and Wall Street

Journal corpora. There was no difference in the proportion of instrument PPs co-occurring

with behead (M ¼ 0:06, SE ¼ 0:1) and kill (M ¼ 0:08, SE ¼ 0:12) verbs. The results of this

study suggest that any differences between the processing offiller-gap sentences with kill and

behead verbs are unlikely to be due to stored co-occurrence information.

All in all, the extensive norming we performed resulted in sentences which were

equally grammatical and whose fillers were equally plausible across behead and kill verbs.

Furthermore, overall verb frequencies favored kill verbs (M ¼ 186:1) over behead verbs

(M ¼ 26:8) (Kucera & Francis, 1967). Because all sentences were grammatical and

equally plausible, we expect differences in reading times to be subtle and relatively small

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 91

compared to those of previous filler-gap experiments whose materials were not as

extensively normed and which compared incommensurate participant categories (say,

patient and adjuncts of argument NPs).

5.2.1.3. Procedure. This study used a region-by-region reading time paradigm. Sentences

were presented across two lines of a video monitor of an IBM PC clone using a moving

window procedure. Each trial began with two rows of dashes that were left-aligned on the

monitor’s screen. The first and second rows of dashes corresponded to all of the non-white-

space characters of the stimulus sentence. Participants pressed the spacebar of a keyboard

to reveal each successive region of text. For all experimental sentences, the first four

critical presentation regions and at least one word of the last presentation region were

presented on the first line of text. Participants were instructed to read each sentence at their

normal rate. Reading times were collected for each region. Before beginning the experi-

ment, participants read some instructions that described the task. Following instructions,

participants completed ten practice trials to familiarize themselves with the task and the

response keys, before beginning the experiment.

5.2.2. Results

Prior to analysis, participants’ answers to comprehension questions were examined.

Accuracy for each participant was at least 85%. Outliers were identified in a two-stage

process following the procedure outlined in Zurif, Swinney, Prather, Solomon, and

Bushells (1993).9 First, after inspecting the distribution of reading times it was determined

Table 5

Mean ratings and standard errors (in parentheses) for instrument and non-instrument verb filler-gap sentences

with PP and NP WH-fillers, and sentences with Complex-NP, WH-island, and subject–verb agreement violations

Instrument arguments Instrument adjuncts Grammatical violations

PP filler NP filler PP filler NP filler SVA C-NP island WH-island

5.7 (0.2) 5.6 (0.2) 5.9 (0.2) 5.8 (0.2) 2.0 (0.2) 1.6 (0.1) 1.1 (0.1)

9 A number of procedures for dealing with outliers are common in the literature. Some researchers identify a

cut-off value, applied to all participant scores, to exclude extreme scores (e.g. Clifton, 1993; McKoon, Albritton,

& Ratcliff, 1996). A potential problem with this approach is that it is likely to differentially affect data from the

slowest readers for long cut-off values and the fastest readers for short cut-off values. An alternative approach,

adopted by many researchers (e.g. Boland, 1997; Trueswell & Kim, 1998) is to replace extreme values with

boundary values that are based on the mean plus or minus some multiple of the standard deviation of the

distribution of scores for each participant. This procedure also has shortcomings under some conditions. When the

number of observations per participants is small, as it was in this study, this procedure may fail to identify

potentially extreme values in a participant’s distribution of scores because the presence of another extreme score

in the opposite direction or an even more extreme score in the same direction considerably inflates the variance.

Such extreme scores are often not likely to be accurate reflections of reading time. For example, it is highly

unlikely that participants could recognize and integrate into a developing sentence representation a one- or two-

word phrase of average length in a word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase reading task in 250 ms or less. Typically,

such short reading times are due to the accidental early triggering of a response key. Similarly, extremely long

scores are also unlikely to reflect just word recognition and integration processes. In this experiment, to identify

outliers, we adopted a hybrid approach advocated by some researchers (e.g. Zurif et al., 1993).

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10392

that a few scores, namely those that were shorter than 250 ms or exceeded 3000 ms, most

likely reflected off-task behavior (e.g. accidental triggering of a response key or

inattention). The selected values did not sample more from the distributions of slow or fast

readers than from the distributions of average readers. The affected reading times, which

accounted for 1.3% of the data, were removed prior to computing outlier replacement

values. In the remaining data, outliers for the distribution of each participant’s reading

time within a given region were replaced by a boundary value equivalent to the mean plus

or minus 2.5 standard deviations. Replaced values accounted for an additional 1.5% of the

reading times.

Two other details are relevant to the analyses we performed. After data collection was

completed, we realized that four of our instrument verbs were eponymous with potential

fillers (e.g. drill, till, whip, and whisk). Because the reading times for these items could

have biased results in favor of our hypothesis, we excluded them prior to analysis. The

aforementioned error in counterbalancing resulted in unbalanced lists for the analysis by

items. ANOVAs on the means from the resultant unbalanced lists were conducted using

GANOVA 4 (Brecht, Woodward, & Bonett, 1982–1987) which employs computational

procedures based on a cell means ANOVA model. ANOVAs conducted using this model

yield results that are computationally equivalent to a Type III reparameterization

adjustment strategy for unbalanced lists in statistical packages, such as SAS, whose

computational procedures are based on a less than full rank ANOVA model (Woodward,

Bonett, & Brecht, 1990: p. 219 and references therein).

Because of baseline differences in the frequencies of occurrence of kill verbs and

behead verbs (Kucera & Francis, 1967), reading times to kill and behead verb sentences

with NP fillers cannot be compared to each other at the verb region. Instead, we compared

NP filler sentences with kill and behead verbs to their respective PP filler controls.

Moreover, string lengths systematically differed between NP and PP filler sentences in the

crucial direct object (DO) þ gap region since experimental sentences included the

preposition with while control sentence did not. We therefore computed residual reading

times to partial out the influence of string length on reading times following procedures

outlined in Ferreira and Clifton (1986) and Trueswell, Tanenhaus, and Garnsey (1994).

Mean residual reading times for NP and PP behead and kill filler-gap sentences across

subject NP (e.g. did the rebels), verb (e.g. behead/kill), and direct object (^with) regions

are shown in Fig. 4. As one can see, residual reading times to NP filler sentences were

longer than PP filler sentences at the verb and direct object position. Similarly, kill

sentences elicited longer reading times at the direct object than behead sentences. Finally,

whereas NP filler sentences with behead verbs did not differ from their PP filler control at

the direct object region, NP filler sentences with kill verbs elicited longer residual reading

times than control sentences with PP fillers at both the verb and direct object regions. To

provide a point of comparison with other reading time studies, raw reading times for these

regions are shown in Table 6 and Fig. 5.

Residual reading times were submitted to two separate 4 (List) £ 2 (Verb type) £ 2

(Filler type) analyses of variance with participants and items as random variables for two

regions of interest: the verb and the direct object (þwith) region.

5.2.2.1. Verb region. Sentences with NP fillers elicited longer reading times at the verb

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 93

than sentences with PP fillers in analyses by participant and items (F1ð1; 96Þ ¼ 7:66,

MSe ¼ 10399, P , 0:01; F2ð1; 16Þ ¼ 7:31, MSe ¼ 1974, P , 0:02). This difference was

consistent across verb types, emerging in both sentences with semantically obligatory

instrument verbs like behead (F1ð1; 96Þ ¼ 3:87, MSe ¼ 9710, P , 0:05;

F2ð1; 16Þ ¼ 2:02, MSe ¼ 3396, P ¼ 0:17), and sentences with semantically optional

instrument verbs like kill (F1ð1; 96Þ ¼ 9:89, MSe ¼ 9228, P , 0:01; F2ð1; 16Þ ¼ 6:98,

MSe ¼ 1104, P , 0:05). No other effects were significant.

5.2.2.2. Direct object region. As predicted, sentences with semantically obligatory

instrument verbs like behead elicited faster reading times than sentences with semantically

optional instrument verbs like kill (F1ð1; 96Þ ¼ 13:09, MSe ¼ 29186, P , 0:01;

F2ð1; 16Þ ¼ 10:91, MSe ¼ 102273, P , 0:01). This effect of Verb type was consistent

across the two types of filler sentences. Reading times were longer for kill verb sentences

with NP fillers (F1ð1; 96Þ ¼ 11:86, MSe ¼ 24900, P , 0:01; F2ð1; 16Þ ¼ 11:17,

MSe ¼ 4828, P , 0:01), and for sentences with PP fillers (F1ð1; 96Þ ¼ 6:59,

MSe ¼ 16580, P , 0:01; F2ð1; 16Þ ¼ 4:04, MSe ¼ 4945, P # 0:06). We also observed

a main effect of Filler type. Overall, sentences with NP fillers elicited longer reading times

than sentences with PP fillers. These differences were significant in the analysis by

participants (F1ð1; 96Þ ¼ 8:28, MSe ¼ 9247, P # 0:005), and trended in the analysis by

items (F2ð1; 16Þ ¼ 3:29, MSe ¼ 4253, P # 0:09). However, the effect of filler type was

not consistent across verb type. Sentences with NP fillers elicited longer reading times

than sentences with PP fillers when their main verb was an optional instrument verb like

Fig. 4. Mean residual reading times for behead and kill verbs with NP and PP fillers across three regions.

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10394

kill (F1ð1; 96Þ ¼ 11:86, MSe ¼ 24900, P , 0:01), but not when their main verb was an

obligatory instrument main verb like behead (F1&2 # 0:60).

5.2.3. Discussion

The results of this study provide psychological evidence supporting the obligatoriness

criterion for argument status. Filler-gap sentences with NP fillers were easier to process

when the semantic representation of a main verb included an obligatory instrument

participant than when it did not. More specifically, shorter reading times were found at the

direct object regions of behead verb sentences (which provided lexical evidence for the

integration of the filler as an instrument of the event) than kill sentences. Furthermore,

longer reading times were found at the direct object regions of kill verb sentences with NP

fillers than with PP fillers, which provided syntactic evidence that the filler could not be a

direct object. In contrast, there were no differences in reading times at the direct object

Fig. 5. Mean raw reading times for behead and kill verbs with NP and PP fillers across three regions.

Table 6

Raw reading times to behead and kill verb sentences with NP and PP fillers across the subject, verb, and direct

object (DO) regions

Verb type Filler type Subject Verb DO (þ with)

Behead NP 735 585 842

PP 763 554 679

Kill NP 725 607 912

PP 749 579 729

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 95

position of behead verb sentences as a function of filler type. This pattern of data is

consistent with the hypothesis that readers used instrument participant information that is

associated with behead but not kill verbs to predict upcoming indirect object gaps for WH

fillers. In addition, these results also confirm that argument status cannot be adjudicated on

the basis of participant category. Constituents expressing instrument participants are

neither uniformly adjuncts nor arguments. Rather, their argument status depends on their

obligatoriness for particular verbs. Although we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that

these results could be attributed to differences in the plausibility of WH-fillers as indirect

objects of behead and kill verbs or differences in the implausibility of fillers as direct

objects, the fact that fillers were selected on the basis of plausibility norms to be equivalent

or even to favor the kill verb sentences suggests that this possibility is remote. Similarly,

these results could have arisen from differences in the frequency with which instrument

PPs co-occur with kill and behead verbs. But we found no such differences in a corpora

study. Finally, one might argue that these differences could be due to differences in the

grammaticality of filler-gap sentences with NP extracted from arguments (behead) and

adjuncts (kill). However, the results of our grammaticality judgment study demonstrate

that readers similar to the participants in this on-line study found NP extractions from both

kill and behead verb sentences as acceptable as extractions of PP fillers in the same

sentence frames. Thus, the most plausible explanation for the observed pattern of results is

that behead verbs provide obligatory instrument participant information for the

interpretation of NP fillers while kill verbs do not.

More generally, the pattern of results we observed receives a natural explanation within

constraint-based models of processing. Recall that when fillers are ultimately associated

with a position other than the direct object, anomaly effects typically do not appear until

after the verb is processed. We predicted and found that anomaly effects would not emerge

at the verb but instead would be found at the next region of analysis. However, we also

observed that sentences with PP fillers were read faster than sentences with NP fillers in

the verb region. This is most likely due to combined effects of readers knowing that the PP

fillers were syntactically impossible as direct objects and the implausibility of PP fillers as

direct objects. A different situation arises with the NP filler sentences. NP fillers were

syntactically possible and only semantically implausible as direct objects. Thus, these two

sources of information conflict with each other, leading to longer reading times that only

get resolved in the next region. Finally, in the direct object region, an interesting pattern

emerges. Note first that there is no difference in the reading times to NP and PP filler

sentences with behead verbs. In contrast, NP filler sentences elicited significantly longer

reading times than sentences with PP filler controls in kill verb sentences. Moreover, PP

filler sentences with kill verbs required more time to read than either NP or PP filler

sentences with behead verbs. This pattern can best be explained in terms of the quantity

and consistency of the information readers have available to integrate WH-fillers into

sentence representations at this point. For both NP and PP fillers in behead verb sentences,

readers have available not only the syntactic information from the presence of the direct

object that indicates that the filler must be an indirect object, but two sources of semantic

information from the verb: the implausibility of the filler as a direct object, and instrument

participant information that provides positive semantic information regarding the

interpretation of the filler. In contrast, the PP filler sentences of kill verb sentences have

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10396

syntactic and implausibility information at the earlier verb region indicating that the filler

cannot be a direct object but neither the verb nor the direct object region provide any

semantic participant information that could further assist readers in interpreting the PP

filler. Finally, when readers encounter kill verb sentences with NP fillers, they receive only

implausibility information from the preceding verb region and must resolve both the

syntactic category and semantic interpretation of the filler when they encounter the direct

object region. The presence of the preposition with disambiguates the syntactic category at

this point but does not provide unambiguous semantic information that would be of

assistance in interpreting the filler. In conclusion, the pattern of reading times across these

two regions can be explained in terms of the kinds of syntactic and semantic evidence

readers have available to them at different points in processing for parsing and interpreting

a sentence with a WH-filler.

6. Conclusion

It is commonly assumed across the language sciences that only some semantic

participant information is lexically encoded. Despite the large number of extant proposals,

no set of necessary and sufficient criteria has yet been proposed as the basis for the

distinction between arguments and adjuncts. In this paper, we have argued that lexical

encoding of participant information reduces to two semantic criteria: (1) whether

participant information is semantically obligatory; and (2) whether participant information

is specific to a verb or to a restricted verb class to which a verb belongs. Those criteria

fall out naturally from a hierarchical, distributed model of lexical knowledge, whether

it is implemented in a multiple inheritance semantic network or in a more parallel,

distributed representational schema. We have shown, through a comprehensive survey of

approximately 4000 English verbs and eight participant roles, that participant roles that

correspond to the traditional notion of argument as well as more controversial roles such as

semantically obligatory instruments and participant locations do display class specificity,

as predicted. The results of a sentence continuation study and an on-line filler-gap study

support the psychological relevance of both semantic obligatoriness and semantic

specificity as conditions for lexical encoding of participant information. Verbs which,

according to the semantic specificity condition, lexically encode a participant location are

more likely to lead to continuations which express that argument than they are to

continuations which express adjuncts. Similarly, verbs which, according to the SOC,

lexically encode an instrument role facilitate the integration of a WH-filler in a filler-gap

dependency, when compared to verbs whose denotations allow, but do not require an

instrument role. Whether semantic specificity likewise affects the on-line processing of

filler-gap dependencies remains to be explored in future research.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported (in part) by research grant number 1 R01 MH60133-01

from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health and by grants

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 97

from the Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo. We gratefully

acknowledge Beaumont Brush, Tom Graves, Cori Grimm, Anne Joergensen, Leana

Longley, Alissa Melinger, and Chris Phipps for their work on the English verbal lexicon

project, Cerenity Dickerson, Lauren DiMaria, Brian Dugan, Nicole Enzinna, Kathy

Conklin, Min Ju, Leana Longley, Cameron Stelmach, and Jeffrey Wescott for assistance in

data collection and analysis, and David Braun for his perceptive comments. All remaining

errors are ours.

Appendix A

A.1. Stimuli for Experiment 1

Participant location sentences (a) and control sentences (b).

1a The collectible doll was advertised

1b The collectible doll was sold

2a The veneer was applied

2b The veneer was prepared

3a The juicy steak was barbecued

3b The juicy steak was turned

4a The new puppy was bathed

4b The new puppy was washed

5a The soup was boiled

5b The soup was stirred

6a The flavored coffee was brewed

6b The flavored coffee was warmed

7a The pitbull was caged

7b The pitbull was tranquilized

8a The microfilm was concealed

8b The microfilm was detected

9a The steer were confined

9b The steer were castrated

10a The days’ profits were deposited

10b The days’ profits were checked

11a The bags of cocaine were discovered

11b The bags of cocaine were reported

12a The new painting was displayed

12b The new painting was straightened

13a The hole was drilled

13b The hole was measured

14a The deposit was entered

14b The deposit was verified

15a The defect was found

15b The defect was noticed

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–10398

16a The ornaments were hung

16b The ornaments were broken

17a The evidence was hidden

17b The evidence was destroyed

18a The acorns were hoarded

18b The acorns were eaten

19a The cooked pata was immersed

19b The cooked pata was seasoned

20a The new memory was inserted

20b The new memory was tested

21a The important passage was located

21b The important passage was discussed

22a The car was parked

22b The car was damaged

23a The heroin was planted

23b The heroin was transported

24a The data points were plotted

24b The data points were examined

25a The reading list was posted

25b The reading list was revised

26a The molten steel was poured

26b The molten steel was cooled

27a The discount price was printed

27b The discount price was calculated

28a The advertisement was published

28b The advertisement was purchased

29a The physics lectures were recorded

29b The physics lectures were collected

30a The turkey was roasted

30b The turkey was sliced

31a The salad dressing was spilled

31b The salad dressing was made

32a The caviar was spread

32b The caviar was tasted

33a The sailor was stationed

33b The sailor was commended

34a The automatic weapons were stored

34b The automatic weapons were arranged

35a The sailing gear was stowed

35b The sailing gear was inspected

36a The defective bolt was unscrewed

36b The defective bolt was seen

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103 99

A.2. Stimuli for Experiment 2

NP and PP filler sentences with instrument and non-instrument verbs. An asterisks (*)

marks eponymous items removed from analyses.

1 (With) What kind of cloth did the mother bathe/wipe the tiny baby (with) last night?

2 (With) Which sword did the rebels behead/kill the traitor king (with) during the

rebellion?

3 (With) What type of knife did the butcher chop/separate the chicken legs (with)

yesterday afternoon?

4 (With) Which bulldozer did the man dig/fill the hole (with) on Thursday?

5 (With) What type of liquid did the fireman extinguish/contain the street fire (with)

last week?

6 (With) What type of spear did the pygmies jab/attack the angry lion (with) in the

documentary?

7 (With) What type of needle did the doctor lance/drain the patient’s boil (with)

last month?

8 (With) Which tractor did the farmer plow/prepare the wheat field (with) on Tuesday?

9 (With) Which stick did the children poke/tease the poisonous snake (with) this

morning?

10 (With) What kind of toy did the child prod/bother the angry cat (with) cruelly in the

yard?

11 (With) Which needle did the child puncture/burst the big balloon (with) at the fair?

12 (With) Which spoon did the cook scoop/sample the ice cream (with) for the party?

13 (With) Which key did the teenagers scratch/vandalize the girl’s new car (with) last

night?

14 (With) Which spatula did the chef spread/decorate the chocolate icing (with) at the

restaurant?

15 (With) What type of weapon did the knight stab/intimidate the fiery dragon (with) in

the famous story?

16 (With) Which spoon did the cook stir/serve the hot soup (with) this afternoon?

17 (With) What kind of baton did the policeman strike/threaten the violent protester

(with) during the riot?

18 (With) What type of rope did the kidnapper tie/restrain the little kid (with) during the

robbery?

19 (With) Which hoe did the gardener till/work the dry soil (with) last weekend?

20 (With) Which card did the security guard unlock/deactivate the automatic door

(with) this morning?

21 *(With) Which whisk did the maid whip/make the tasty cream (with) last night?

22 *(With) Which leash did the woman whip/train the frisky dog (with) this morning?

23 *(With) Which fork did my sister whisk/eat the scrambled eggs (with) on the

counter?

24 *(With) Which tool did the builder drill/widen the tiny hole (with) during the

renovations?

J.-P. Koenig et al. / Cognition 89 (2003) 67–103100

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