Recent experimental evidence suggests that a prototypical concept of transitive events (“unmarked transitivity”), which has proven a useful descriptive notion in language typological research, also plays a crucial role during real time language comprehension. In this chapter, we review neurocognitive evidence for unmarked transitivity from both a neuroanatomical (spatial) and neurophysiological (temporal) perspective. We further show how unmarked transitivity, which we characterise as the default realisation of a more general requirement for argument distinctness, can be integrated into a comprehensive model of cross-linguistic language comprehension. Finally, we discuss possible consequences of the comprehension findings for theoretical characterisations of language architecture, with a particular focus on Role and Reference Grammar.
Cited by (36)
Cited by 36 other publications
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Cristofaro, Sonia
2014. Competing motivation models and diachrony: What evidence for what motivations?. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 282 ff.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Gary Libben & Katharina Korecky‐Kröll
2014. Conflicting vs. convergent vs. interdependent motivations in morphology. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 180 ff.
Dröge, Alexander, Laura Maffongelli & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky
2014. Motivating competitions. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 262 ff.
Francis, Elaine J. & Laura A. Michaelis
2014. Why move? How weight and discourse factors combine to predict relative clause extraposition in English. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 70 ff.
Haiman, John
2014. Six competing motives for repetition. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 246 ff.
Haspelmath, Martin
2014. On system pressure competing with economic motivation. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 197 ff.
Hawkins, John A.
2014. Patterns in competing motivations and the interaction of principles. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 54 ff.
Helmbrecht, Johannes
2014. Politeness distinctions in personal pronouns: A case study on competing motivations. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 315 ff.
Hughes, Mary E. & Shanley E. M. Allen
2014. Competing motivations in children's omission of subjects? The interaction between verb finiteness and referent accessibility. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 144 ff.
Kaltenböck, Gunther & Bernd Heine
2014. Sentence grammar vs. thetical grammar: Two competing domains?. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 348 ff.
Krajewski, Grzegorz & Elena Lieven
2014. Competing cues in early syntactic development. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 163 ff.
Lamers, Monique J. A. & Helen de Hoop
2014. Animate object fronting in Dutch: A production study. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 42 ff.
MacWhinney, Brian
2014. Conclusions: Competition across time. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 364 ff.
Brian MacWhinney, Andrej Malchukov & Edith Moravcsik
2014. Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage,
Malchukov, Andrej
2014. Resolving alignment conflicts: A competing motivations approach. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 16 ff.
Mondorf, Britta
2014. Apparently competing motivations in morphosyntactic variation. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 209 ff.
Moravcsik, Edith
2014. Introduction. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 1 ff.
Newmeyer, Frederick J.
2014. Where do motivations compete?. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 299 ff.
Pfeiffer, Martin
2014. Formal vs. functional motivations for the structure of self‐repair in German. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 229 ff.
Rowland, Caroline F., Claire Noble & Angel Chan
2014. Competition all the way down: How children learn word order cues to sentence meaning. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 127 ff.
Strunk, Jan
2014. A statistical model of competing motivations affecting relative clause extraposition in German. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 88 ff.
Roehm, Dietmar, Antonella Sorace & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky
2013. Processing flexible form-to-meaning mappings: Evidence for enriched composition as opposed to indeterminacy. Language and Cognitive Processes 28:8 ► pp. 1244 ff.
Wang, Luming, Matthias Schlesewsky, Markus Philipp & Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky
2012. The Role of Animacy in Online Argument Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. In Case, Word Order and Prominence [Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, 40], ► pp. 91 ff.
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina & Matthias Schlesewsky
2009. Minimality as vacuous distinctness: Evidence from cross-linguistic sentence comprehension. Lingua 119:10 ► pp. 1541 ff.
Bornkessel‐Schlesewsky, Ina & Matthias Schlesewsky
2009. The Role of Prominence Information in the Real‐Time Comprehension of Transitive Constructions: A Cross‐Linguistic Approach. Language and Linguistics Compass 3:1 ► pp. 19 ff.
Bornkessel‐Schlesewsky, Ina & Matthias Schlesewsky
2014. Competition in argument interpretation: Evidence from the neurobiology of language. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. 107 ff.
Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog
2009. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis,
[no author supplied]
2014. List of abbreviations. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. xviii ff.
2014. Preface. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. vii ff.
[no author supplied]
2014. List of figures and tables. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. xiv ff.
[no author supplied]
2014. Notes on contributors. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. viii ff.
[no author supplied]
2014. Copyright Page. In Competing Motivations in Grammar and Usage, ► pp. iv ff.
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