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Two eyetracking experiments examined the reading of sentences like "While the police/truck stopped the Datsun disappeared into the night." A paper by L. Stowe (Thematic structures and sentence comprehension. In G. N. Carlson and M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Linguistic structure in language processing, 1989) indicated that an inanimate subject ("truck" in "After the truck stopped the Datsun disappeared ...") is taken as theme of the ergative verb ("stop"), preventing the assignment of the postverbal noun phrase ("the Datsun") as direct object. This eliminates the disruption of reading that is normally observed on the disambiguating verb ("disappear"). The present experiments found the pattern of results reported by Stowe when looking at the disambiguating region of a sentence. However, the results for earlier regions suggest that the postverbal noun phrase was initially taken as direct object of an ergative verb even when the subject was inanimate. It appears that the inanimacy of the subject may not have guided the initial syntactic analysis, but rather facilitated the revision of an initial misanalysis.
Charles Clifton (Tue,) studied this question.