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The present thesis consists of two parts. Part I investigates the effects of a specific semantic characteristic of syntactically transitive predicates on different aspects of online sentence processing: the degree of affectedness such a predicate implies for the argument realised as the direct object, which is taken to indicate the extent to which the respective event participant necessarily undergoes a change of state during the event expressed. For example, while it is clear that the window changes maximally in an event such as The boy broke the window , it may survive unscathed in The boy hit the window. In part I, I present three experiments (using acceptability judgements, reading times and event-related potentials – ERPs) investigating the effects of affectedness on the processing of the predicate itself as well as on the integration of following argument noun phrases (NPs), thus providing a picture of the impact of affectedness on lexical-semantic processing (as measured on the predicates) and its possible influence in online argument integration (as measured on the NP arguments) during sentence reading. Arguing that the effects of affectedness on processes related to argument linking are maximised when using German -ung nominalisations derived from verbs implying different degrees of affectedness for the event participant realised as direct object (such as Bewunderung/admiration or Ermordung/assassination ), rather than verbs themselves, the experiments make use of a paradigm involving the linking of either subject or object genitive argument NPs to such deverbal, eventive nominalisations. The graded approach to affectedness developed by Beavers (2010, 2011) allows to view the degree of affectedness implied for an object argument as a form of semantic argument prominence induced by the predicate, providing links to prototype-based theories of argument linking and thus also to a specific model of sentence processing, the Extended Argument Dependency Model (eADM – Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006), which attributes a central role to these aspects of NP arguments in sentence parsing. While no clear evidence for effects of affectedness on the predicate (the nominalisations) was found in the two online processing experiments, the analysis of the data related to the integration of either subject or object genitives converged across experiments and revealed a specific interaction between the degree of affectedness and the acceptability of linking either subject or object genitives. These acceptability patterns were accompanied by consistent reading time and ERP interaction effects. Analysis of the ERP data using the wavelet-based functional mixed model (WFMM – Morris & Carroll, 2006) suggests a prominent role of two temporally concurrent late positivities with left posterior and anterior midline foci in the integration of the genitive arguments. These findings are discussed in the context of the theoretical and sentence processing models mentioned above, considering possible roles of argument prototypicality and of differences between predicate-induced and argument-inherent semantic argument prominence (such as animacy and definiteness). The second part introduces two software packages for the statistical environment R which were used for the WFMM-based analysis of the ERP data in the first part: the wrapfmm package provides a high-level wrapper for the WFMM executable, while the stepmom (spatiotemporal electrophysiological model maps) package allows to model multi-channel ERP data using the WFMM.

Predicate-induced semantic prominence in online argument linking: experiments on affectedness and analytical tools