How language represents meaning remains a central topic of debate in linguistics. On some accounts, the nounphrases in a sentence are identified semantically by a list of independent atomic labels (thematic roles), ordered relative to oneanother depending on the position of the nouns around the verb (e.g., AGENT-THEME-GOAL). Others instead capture suchinterdependencies with complex, non-atomic event structures (e.g., [x CAUSE [y TO-COME-TO-BE-AT z]]). Here, we usestructural priming to investigate the psychological reality of these two theories of semantic representation. On the thematicrole approach, we should expect to see priming between theme-first locatives and prepositional-object datives (both VP-NP-PPsyntactically) precisely because their thematic ordering is consistent across the two constructions. The event structure approachposits no such minimal semantic structural similarity, such that we should not see priming cross-constructionally. We find onlywithin-construction priming (N=52) and not across-construction priming (total N=344), in favor of event structures.

Verbs may refer to the means (I bumped into the lamp) or outcome (I broke the lamp) of an action (cf. Rappaport Hovav & Levin, 2010; Talmy, 1985). Do young children expect language to encode this distinction? Children’s imitation patterns suggest that they analyze nonlinguistic events in these terms. When a head-touch is the simplest action available, toddlers include just the outcome, not the means, in their own imitation (Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002). We ask whether syntax influences this inference. An experimenter with her hands occupied made a toy activate with a headtouch, using either Means-focused (I’m daxing to my toy) or Outcome-focused language (I’m daxing my toy). Toddlers then imitated the action. Means- but not Outcome-focus language encouraged children to include the distinctive headtouch, overriding the standard ‘rational imitation’ effect. This suggests that toddlers’ knowledge of argument structure includes an understanding of a means/outcome divide in verb meaning.