Eppur non si muove: Experimental evidence for the Unaccusative Hypothesis and distinct ɸ-feature processing in Basque

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Date
2019-11
Author
Martínez de la Hidalga Malla, Gillen ORCID
Zawiszewski, Adam ORCID
Laka Mugarza, Itziar ORCID
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Glossa-A Journal of General Linguistics 4(1) : (2019) // Article ID 120
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10810/41847
Abstract
The Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH) has been extensively studied in linguistics, but, to date, it has not been tested by means of ERPs. The present study aimed to experimentally test the UH hypothesis in Basque and determine what the electrophysiological correlates are of the processing of unergative versus unaccusative predicates; it also aimed to investigate distinctness in phi-feature processing. We generated eight conditions to compare unergative and unaccusative predicate sentence processing involving phi-feature violations in grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Participants responded faster to sentences containing unaccusative predicates compared to unergative predicates. All conditions elicited a N400-P600 interaction. Overall, the negativity elicited by person violations was larger than the negativity elicited by number violations in both types of predicates. Intransitives differed regarding the size of the positivity elicited by phi-feature violations: unaccusatives elicited a larger positivity for number than for person feature violations, but unergatives elicited a larger positivity for person than for number.
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2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.