ABSTRACT
The seminal work of Marlsen-Wilson and colleagues in the early 1970s highlighted the fact that language comprehension takes place rapidly, with readers and listeners making commitments to at least partial interpretations soon after receiving the linguistic input (e.g. Marslen-Wilson, 1973). Because comprehension takes place on-line, it is essential to know what information is available to the processing system as a sentence unfolds in time, and how different types of information are coordinated in real-time processing. One of the richest sources of information available to the processing system is ‘combinatory’ lexical information, or lexicallybased information about how a word combines syntactically and semantically with other words in a sentence. Combinatory lexical information would be especially useful to the processing system if it provided (1) information that would allow the system to rapidly integrate the word with prior input and (2) information about—i.e. constraints on—the nature of the incoming input. In much of our recent work, we have been developing and exploring the hypothesis that information associated with the argument structure of verbs, especially thematic information, has just these properties (Boland & Tanenhaus, 1991; Boland, Tanenhaus & Garnsey, 1990; Carlson & Tanenhaus, 1988; Tanenhaus & Carlson, 1989; Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Boland, 1990).
