An ERP approach to thematic hierarchies regarding grammatical objects of the Chinese verb Chi (eat)

This article investigates the Chinese verb chi 'to eat', which licenses a variety of direct objects with the semantic roles Patient, Means, Source, Locative, and Instrument, respectively. An ERP test with Chinese native speakers reveals that N400 wave amplitudes decrease along the cline Instrument > Locative > Source > Means > Patient. Patient objects denoting food represent the default case and require the lowest amount of cognitive effort in their interpretation in comparison to non-Patients. In contrast, the roles Means, Source, Locative and Instrument are literally incongruent with chi and require more complex inferencing processes than Patient objects in order to be interpreted coherently. We propose that non-Patient roles are understood metonymically as Patients with the meaning 'food'. The metonymic inferences involved in the interpretation of non-Patients are reflected in their stronger N400 effects in comparison to Patients. The results of our experiment and our conceptual analysis support Dowty's theory of proto-roles, in particular the notion of Proto-Patient.