통사-의미 역학의 신경언어학적 연구: L2 영어 학습자의 ‘의문절 강요(question clause coercion)’ 구문 처리에 관한 ERP 기반 증거

Abstract

This paper examined the brain responses to the question clause semantic coercion construction by Korean leaners of English. The construction at issue like The announcer guessed [the winner of the contest] is known to undergo semantic type shifting of the DP complement, which is understood as the clause like [who the winner of the contest was] rather than as it itself. We measured the neural responses by using the event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm and analyzed them in relation to the aspectual and complement semantic coercion constructions. It was found that the construction in question does not elicit N400 nor P600, unlike the other two constructions compared. We took it to show that question coercion has to be understood in the different ways from aspectual and complement coercion. In other words, for L2 learners the former type of coercion involves neither of semantic and syntactic shifts that the latter types of coercion allegedly do. In a nutshell, this study points to the finer-grained classification of different types of semantic coercion.