Sense and structure: Meaning as a determinant of verb subcategorization preferences

Readers are sensitive to the fact that verbs may allow multiple subcategorization frames that differ in their probability of occurrence. Although a verb’s overall subcategorization preferences can be described probabilistically, underlying non-random factors may determine those probabilities. One potential factor is verb semantics: Many verbs show sense differences, and a verb’s subcategorization profile can vary by sense. Thus, although find can occur with a direct object (DO) or a sentential complement (SC), when it is used to mean ‘locate’ it occurs only with a DO, whereas in its ‘realize’ sense it is SC-biased, but can take either frame. We used corpus analyses to identify verbs that occur with both frames, and found that their subcategorization probabilities differ by sense. Off-line sentence completions demonstrated that contexts can promote a specific sense of a verb, which subsequently influenced subcategorization probability. Finally, in a self-paced reading time experiment, verbs occurred in target sentences containing either a structurally unambiguous or ambiguous SC, following a context favoring the verb’s DO- or SC-biased sense. Sense-biasing context influenced reading times at that, and interacted with ambiguity in the disambiguating region. Thus, readers use sense-contingent subcategorization preferences during on-line language comprehension.