Thematic separation in light of sentence comprehension

Abstract

Thematic relations are traditionally analysed as projecting into derivations of sentence meanings from the lexical content of verbs. Thematic separation, a natural outgrowth of event semantics, proposes an alternative to this tradition: thematic relations are introduced into derivations by verb-independent elements and are, therefore, grammatically separate from the lexical content of verbs. Although critical to theories of meaning and lexical representation, the evidence for thematic separation has not been reckoned with widely in linguistic theory, and the consequent implications for psycholinguistic theories have not received proper consideration. This is surprising as the representations permitted by thematic separation comport quite well with evidence for pre-verbal thematic interpretation during real-time sentence comprehension. Psycholinguistic theories, therefore, stand to benefit from engagement with separationist alternatives to thematic relations, and may, in turn, shed light on the representations semantic theory should provide. After briefly defending the utility of events in semantic representation, this paper motivates thematic separation with evidence from the cumulative interpretations and adnominal modal adverbs; two cases where a semantic operator intervenes between a thematic relation and a verbal predicate. Psycholinguistic results investigating pre-verbal thematic interpretation then follow, where thematic separation is argued to furnish theories with coherent incremental representations without commitment to specific verbal predicates. The timecourse of verb predictability is also shown to intersect with ongoing debates on the granularity of thematic relations, suggesting further connections between semantic and psycholinguistic theory to be explored.