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      Why are verbal nouns more verbal than finite verbs? New insights into the interpretation of the P200 verbal signature

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          Abstract

          Traditionally, languages are assumed to minimally manifest a distinction between nouns and verbs. This assumption has occasionally been debated in the theoretical linguistic literature, in particular in the context of challenging verbal noun constructions that simultaneously manifest nominal and verbal features. From a psycholinguistic perspective, one of the most promising diagnostic criteria for determining whether a given word belongs to the category NOUN or VERB is an event-related brain potential (ERP) component, P200, whose amplitude is larger for verbs than for nouns. So far, a challenge for the interpretation of the P200 has been whether this component reflects verbal (e.g., action) semantics, lexical category or verb-related morphological operation. In the present study we report an ERP experiment whose goal was to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of the “verbal” P200 component by monitoring the comprehension of Polish morphologically related finite verbs, converbs, and verbal nouns. Thereby, we manipulated the syntactic category and morphological complexity of the critical words while keeping their semantics identical. The results show that finite verbs engender a smaller amplitude of the P200 component than less prototypical “verbs” such as verbal nouns and converbs. Based on this observation, we argue that the P200 component reflects the brain activation triggered by the demands of verb-related morphological integration processes performed on the verbal base of derived forms.

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                2397-1835
                Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
                Ubiquity Press
                2397-1835
                03 July 2018
                2018
                : 3
                : 1
                : 78
                Affiliations
                [1 ]University of Wrocław, Institute of English Studies, Kuźnicza 22, 50–138 Wrocław, PL
                [2 ]Constance University, Department of Linguistics, Universitätsstraße 10, D-78457 Konstanz, DE
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8332-2827
                Article
                10.5334/gjgl.365
                3391f0e2-aae5-4e4d-b454-f13e38a1ef85
                Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s)

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 01 March 2017
                : 08 February 2018
                Categories
                Research

                General linguistics,Linguistics & Semiotics
                P200,ERP,derived forms,converbs,verbal nouns,nominal and verbal categories

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