A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF NOUN-VERB RELATIONSHIPS IN EXPERIENTIAL-VERB ENGLISH SENTENCES
Abstract (summary)
Verbs referring to mental experience in English differ in how they assign the case role "experiencer" to sentence nouns. Verbs like enjoy are "Left-Hand Experiencers" (LHEs) in that they assign experiencer to the left-hand noun in a simple active sentence. Verbs like delight are "Right-Hand Experiencers" (RHEs) in that they assign experiencer to the right-hand noun.
LHE and RHE verbs raise questions about semantic and syntactic organization in sentences. Past research has investigated whether subjects or objects of sentences are more important conceptually. Some of this research has suggested that sentences are organized conceptually in ways consistent with Chomskyan syntactic theory. However, other studies have suggested that sentences are organized conceptually in ways that are more consistent with semantic (case) theories of language.
This study reports on research in which sentences having LHE and RHE verbs were used to investigate the relative role of syntactic and semantic structure in experiential-verb English sentences. A series of experiments looked at patterns of recall and interpretation in such sentences. Three sentence-memory experiments found no effect of syntactic or semantic structure on memory for nouns and verbs. However, in experiments in which readers were asked to judge which nouns were topics of sentences, the patterns of response were significantly different for LHE and RHE verbs. The overall results suggest that the organization of the experiential-verb sentence involves complex interrelations between features of syntactic structure, semantic structure, and discourse (topic-comment) structure.