Kristian Vejbæk Nicolaisen

Kristian Nicolaisen is a PhD student in psycholinguistics. His research concerns the representation and processing of events as well as the interface between language and visual perception. He is also interested in the construction grammar approach to language and cognition. For his dissertation, he is investigating aspects of time in events denoted by double-object verbs and constructions.

Project description:

Argument structure is conventionally considered to be the inherent features of a verb that put constraints on the types of its co-occurring NPs. Additionally, verbs are assumed to relate to event structures with temporal features such as states and events. According to argument-time structure theory (Klein 1999), the notions of event structure and argument structure are inseparable. Verb meaning consequently consists of different states of event participants connected to specific event times. Theories of construction grammar also question conventional understanding of argument structure by assuming the existence of verb independent syntactic patterns stored as units with their associated event structure. The present project investigates the role of lexically abstract grammatical structure in event comprehension from a theoretical and empirical perspective. By measuring gaze allocation during language comprehension, eye-tracking experiments are used to test how grammatical structure (on a morphological and syntactic level) interacts with event structure. Firstly, the focus of the study is on how grammatical aspect modulates temporal features of event representation during online comprehension and can be used in the prediction of upcoming event participants and object states. Secondly, the study focuses on how abstract syntactic structure of the double-object construction is utilized in the prediction of event structure and the integration of event participants. 

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