It is generally assumed that dative is assigned in a different projection than accusative, both for indirect objects of ditransitive verbs and for single objects of noncanonical case marking verbs (e.g., Meinunger 2006; McFadden 2006). Some accounts also suggest that upon encountering a dative verb, the lexical entry of the object NP has to be reaccessed to check for dative morphology, indepen-dently of the animacy of the NPs (this explanation was used by Hopf et al. 1998;
see also Bayer et al. 2001). This would mean that the parser has to restructure the syntactic representation of the sentence once a dative verb is encountered, and possibly reaccess the lexical entry of the object NP. Under this assumption, our results could be explained as reflecting the additional processing costs caused by the extra workload of rearranging the syntactic representation, and
of lexical reaccess to check for dative morphology. This process could be reflected in the negativities found after the presentation of the dative verbs in the left-posterior ROI (see Figure 3, panel B), and could be argued to replace or shift the processing of object animacy in the dative condition. This would mean that in the accusative conditions, the negativities represent a true animacy effect. In the dative conditions, however, the negativity is caused by a comple-tely different process that happens to also be reflected in a negativity. The fact that there is no animacy effect on the verb in dative conditions could mean that the animate objects are licensed by dative verbs (again, a more semantically flavored explanation), that the processing of object animacy differences is delayed until the case marking processing is finished, or else, that both pro-cesses work in parallel, but their effects on the EEG do not simply add up.
The results of the current study do not allow us to distinguish between these different explanations. Especially the distinction between the second (seman-tics-based) and third (syntax-based) explanations would be difficult to realize.
This has methodological as well as linguistic reasons. Since the non-canonical semantics and non-canonical syntax of dative verbs always go together, there are no dative-assigning verbs with prototypically transitive argument semantics in German. Therefore, the factors “canonical/noncanonical syntax”and“ cano-nical/noncanonical argument semantics”cannot be fully crossed. For potential experiments investigating more subtle semantic distinctions, stimulus construc-tion would be made difficult by the limited number of dative-assigning verbs in German. Since accusative and dative-assigning verbs have to be matched for frequency, length and the selectional restrictions concerning argument seman-tics (i.e., they all have to allow for animate subjects, and both animate and inanimate objects), this limited set of verbs is further restricted. For any more restricted subgroup of dative verbs, there simply would not be enough verbs left in the German language to build stimulus material for a sound EEG analysis without repeating the same verbs over and over again. While the semantics and syntax of dative verbs remain highly interesting, a new approach will be needed to disentangle the contribution of these two factors to the processing load associated with dative verbs.
5 Conclusions
In line with the literature, we found that animate objects cause higher proces-sing costs than inanimate objects in German transitive sentences without overt case marking or number congruency. We found that these effects of object animacy occur even if these sentences are grammatical. We show that the effect
of object animacy is modulated (i.e., reduced in the left-posterior ROI) if the verb of the sentence has a noncanonical case marking pattern. Noncanonical case marking patterns indicate nonprototypically transitive semantics with more agentive objects. Future research will have to address whether this modulation of the processing of object animacy reflects syntactic or semantic processing, differences in lexical access, or a combination of several factors.
Acknowledgements: We gratefully acknowledge the technical assistance of Carsten Schliewe.
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