Sentence comprehension; particle verbs; lexical access; transitivity; case marking; ERP; German

What is it about?

German particle verbs consist of a base and a particle, two constituents which occupy separate positions in main clauses, but share one lexical entry. It is still unclear if the combination of particles and bases during sentence comprehension is lexical, syntactic or dual in nature. Using behavioural and ERP measurements, we investigated lexical access and sentence integration of split particle verbs in German two-argument sentences. Our results show that the integration of split particle verbs violating sentence structure or lexical constraints leads to both lexical and syntactic processing difficulty. This extends earlier comparable findings reporting only lexical access difficulties, and suggests that the parse is not immediately abandoned upon encountering a nonexistent particle verb. The integration of grammatical particle verbs assigning lexical case did not lead to measurable processing difficulties. We discuss the impact of this finding for current accounts of the role of lexical case marking in sentence comprehension.

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Why is it important?

During sentence comprehension, most words we encounter correspond to one lexical unit – and in general, one lexical unit is represented by one word. One interesting exception are discontinuous words, multiple words that share one lexical entry. An example for these are particle verbs, verbal compounds like look up, which are especially common in Dutch and German. Particle verbs like German anhören (“to listen to”) consist of a base verb (hören, “to hear”) and a separable prefix, the particle (an). The verb base usually is a verb that also bears an independent meaning, while particles are often homologuous to prepositions or adverbs. In German subordinate clauses, particle verbs occur as one verbal unit at the sentence-final position, in keeping with the underlying SOV word order of German: …dass Peter den riesigen Kuchen aufisst (“…that Peter finishes the giant cake”, literally: that Peter the giant cake up-eats). In German main clauses with simple tense (present or preterite), the finite verb occurs in the second position, revealing number, person and tense information. In the case of particle verbs, however, only the base verb is moved to the second-constituent position. The particle is split from the base and remains in the sentence-final position: Peter isst den riesigen Kuchen auf (“Peter finishes the giant cake”, literally: Peter eats the giant cake up.). It is thus possible that the verb in a German main clause will turn out to be a particle verb once the last word in the sentence has been recognised. This possibility is by no means certain, since many base verbs also occur as standalone nonseparable simple verbs without a particle. This means that in German main clauses with simple tenses, the full lexical information about the verb is only accessible at the clause-final position, and that its semantic and syntactic properties are only revealed after all potential arguments have been. How does the parser deal with these split words that surface in two different positions in the sentence? How does it deal with the potential, but uncertain dependency that is only resolved at the clause-final position? Which processes are triggered when a verb’s predicted semantic and syntactic properties are confirmed – or changed – upon encountering the particle?