Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Activity verbs, in contrast, refer to an action that is neither punctual, nor telic (e.g. walk,
eat).
These four classes capture the verbs that refer to spontaneous actions. To capture the
meaning of the verbs that refer to the action that is induced, Van Valin & LaPolla (1997:
97) introduce causative correlates of the four Aktionsarten. To account the fact that some
verbs behave like activity verbs when they have a non-specific object or a mass noun as
an object (e.g. beer, wine) and as accomplishment verbs when they have a quantified
object (e.g. a glass of beer, a glass of wine), a new category, active accomplishment is
introduced. Together with its causative counterpart, this makes the total of ten verbal
classes. Each of these categories has a distinct logical structure as shown on Table 1.
Table 1. Aktionsart types and their logical structures
Verb class Logical structure
State predicate’ (x) or (x, y)
Activity do’ (x [predicate’ (x) or (x, y)])
Achievement INGR predicate’ (x) or (x, y)
INGR do’ (x [predicate’ (x) or (x, y)])
Accomplishment BECOME predicate’ (x) or (x, y)
BECOME do’ (x [predicate’ (x) or (x, y)])
Active accomplishment do’ (x [predicate 1’ (x, (y))]) & BECOME predicate 2’
(z, x) or (y)
Causative α CAUSE β, where α and β are of any logical structure
The syntax-to-semantics linking – what, in fact, sentence comprehension is made of – is
based on the logical structure of the verb. The linking consists of defining relations
between the arguments in the logical structure and thematic relations, in RRG generalized
thematic relations called ‘macroroles’. There are two macroroles, ‘actor’ and ‘undergoer’
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