Affiliation:
1. Aesthetics, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Abstract
Abstract
This chapter reviews a series of electrophysiological studies conducted on the online processing of Tamil sentences. The only such studies to date on this Dravidian language, these experiments address two broad themes, namely, (a) the processing of animacy information of the subject and object arguments and the relationship between the arguments based on their animacy alone, prior to the availability of verb information, and (b) the processing of dative-subject constructions involving stative verbs. Results suggest that features at the syntax–semantics interface such as animacy are cross-linguistically important for sentence processing, and that dative nominals that play a more subject-like role are processed differently from dative indirect objects in Tamil.
Reference115 articles.
1. Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy.;Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,2003
2. Amritavalli, R. 2004. Experiencer datives in Kannada. In Non-nominative subjects. Vol. 1, ed. by Peri Bhaskararao and K. V. Subbarao, 1–24. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
3. Bates, Elizabeth, and Brian MacWhinney. 1982. Functionalist approaches to grammar. In Language acquisition: The state of the art, ed. by Eric Wanner and Lila R. Gleitman, 173–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Animacy modulates gender agreement comprehension in Hindi: An ERP study.;Language, Cognition and Neuroscience,2021