The wrong horse was bet on: the effects of argument structure versus argument adjacency on the processing of idiomatic sentences.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Psycholinguistic research remains puzzled about the circumstances under which syntactically transformed idioms keep their figurative meaning. There is an abundance of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies that have examined which factors may determine why some idioms are more syntactically fixed than others, including transparency, compositionality, and syntactic frozenness; however, they have returned inconclusive, sometimes even conflicting, results. This is the first study to examine argument structure (i.e., the number of arguments a verb takes) and argument adjacency (i.e., the position of the critical arguments relative to the verb) and their effects on the processing of idiomatic and literal sentences in German. Our results suggest that neither the traditional

SUBMITTER: Reimer L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10194116 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature