Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

neurolinguistic research in which a ‘language universal’ neural substrate for language is a
reasonable assumption. First, defining experimental conditions in notions that can be
applied to all languages makes an experiment performable in other languages. Second,
taken as a language processing model RRG itself makes predictions about different
cognitive processes that are involved in various aspects of the grammatical theory.
Namely, it is not difficult to choose a grammatical feature of a language, say, a number
system, gender or person marking on verbs, and to build 100 sentences with a
grammatical error that involves one of the mentioned features. The number of possible
experiments corresponds to the number of grammatical features in a language. However,
without a linguistic theory it is not easy to interpret the obtained data or to treat the
similar results in a similar fashion cross-linguistically.
RRG treats sentence as a layered structure (Figure 4). This structure is language
universal. All languages make difference between predicating and non-predicating
elements. In all languages predicating elements take arguments (and make difference
between arguments and non-arguments). The sentence structure thus has three levels: (a)
nucleus (predicate), (b) core (predicate + arguments) and (c) clause (predicate +
arguments + periphery (non-arguments)). In a sentence Student reads a book in the
library student and book are arguments of the predicate while in the library is not an
argument of the verb read and belongs to the periphery of the clause. The core arguments
are only the arguments that are part of the semantic representation of the verb (see
below). In this case, the verb read has two arguments that correspond to the traditional
notions of subject and object.
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