Deleting the object marker renders the sentence ungrammatical: Comment on Casado, Martín-Loeches, Muñoz, and Fernández-Frías (2005)

Abstract

During the last years there has been an increasing interest in examining the brain responses to word order variations. In one ERP study conducted in Spanish, Casado, Martín-Loeches, Muñoz, and Fernández-Frías (2005) had participants read Spanish transitive sentences with either an SVO (subject-verb-object) or an OVS order. The word order of a sentence was determined by semantic information (semantic condition) or by syntactic information (syntactic condition). We will focus on the syntactic condition, which suffers from a number of serious pitfalls. By using both linguistic evidence and data from off-line rating studies, we will first show that the authors are wrong in claiming that the OVS sentences in the syntactic condition are grammatical. Secondly, we will show that these sentences are not interpreted as OVS sentences but as SVO sentences. In light of these pitfalls, we conclude that their results in the syntactic condition do not inform issues concerning brain responses to word order variations, but of the detection and repair of an ungrammatical string.

Keywords:

• Spanish syntax
• Object marker
• Word order
• ERPs

Acknowledgements

The present research was partially supported by project grants (SEJ2006-11955/PSIC and PSI2009-12616) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, and by project grants (2005SGR-00471 and 2009SGR-401) from the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Notes

¹It is very unlikely that the differences between the authors judgments and those of Casado et al. are due to dialectal differences, since there are no variations in the use of DOM among the different dialects of Spanish spoken in Spain (Pensado, 1995).