There is a considerable linguistic debate on whether phrasal verbs (e.g., turn up, break down) are processed as two separate words connected by a syntactic rule or whether they form a single lexical unit. Moreover, views differ on whether meaning (transparency vs. opacity) plays a role in determining their syntactically-connected or lexical status. As linguistic arguments could not settle these issues, we used neurophysiological brain imaging to address them. Applying a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN) design with subjects instructed to ignore speech stimuli, we recorded magnetic brain responses to particles (up, down) auditorily presented as infrequent -deviant‖ stimuli in the context of frequently occurring verb -standard‖ stimuli. Already at latencies below 200 ms, magnetic brain responses were larger to particles appearing in existing phrasal verbs as context (e.g. rise up) than when they occurred in non-existing combinations (e.g. *fall up), regardless of whether particles carried a literal or metaphorical sense (e.g. rise up, heat up). Previous research found an enhanced MMN response to morphemes in existing (as opposed to non-existing) words but a reduced MMN to words in grammatically acceptable (as opposed to unacceptable) combinations. The increased brain activation to particles in real phrasal verbs reported here is consistent with the lexical enhancement but inconsistent with the syntactic reduction of the MMN, thus providing neurophysiological support that a congruous verb-particle sequence is not assembled syntactically but rather accessed as a single lexical chunk.

No abstract

This chapter examines the neurophysiological plausibility of some of the claims of Construction Grammar with regard to syntactic structures. It suggests that evidence from neuroscience has highly important repercussions for linguistic theory building in general and argues that the constructionist enterprise receives considerable empirical support from neurolinguistic studies. The chapter examines views on the embodiment of grammar in neuronal circuitry and contends that neurological evidence indicates that it makes sense to postulate flexible constructional templates as distinct from lexical construction storage.

International audienceThis paper reports on a corpus-based method used to compare translated and non-translated English texts, more specifically with respect to how extensively they use verbs expressing manner of motion. On the basis of the well-known typological distinction between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages, it is hypothesized that English translations from French, which is a verb-framed language, contain relatively fewer manner-ofmotion verbs than originally produced English texts. Furthermore, no such difference should exist between English translated from German and original English, as Germanic languages are classified as satellite-framed. Both these hypotheses are borne out, both for self-motion (e.g. crawl, hop, scurry) and caused motion (e.g. chuck, heap, sweep). It is argued that these findings challenge the Explicitation Hypothesis and support the Unique Items Hypothesis