• Higer cognitive functions 7.5 HEC (PSMT55) (Masterlevel)

In my thesis, I investigated grammatical relations (i.e., subject and object) in Swedish transitive sentences from a usage-based perspective. More specifically, the thesis was concerned with the the distribution of grammatical relations in Swedish transitive sentences with respect to argument prominence properties (e.g., animacy and definiteness). The general hypothesis is that prototypical subjects / Actors tend to be more prominent than prototypical direct objects / Undergoers with respect to e.g., animacy and definiteness. Prominence properties of argument NPs are utilized as cues during argument interpretation (i.e, determining which of the two arguments that is the Actor and the Undergoer), on par with morphosyntactic information such as case marking and word order, and the weightings of these cues can be quantified on the basis of the degree to which they correlate with grammatical functions in language use.

In the thesis, I investigated these assumptions on the basis of corpus data, statistical modeling and neuro- and psycholinguistic experimentation (using a event-related brain potentials and a self-paced reading paradigm). I present a statistical model of incremental argument interpretation in isolated sentences that is based upon the distribution of prominence features in the NP arguments of transitive sentences in written Swedish. This model is tested experimentally using the self-paced reading paradigm.