ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
This article is part of the Research TopicWomen in speech and language 2025View all 4 articles
Processing Ergativity in Compound Light Verb Constructions: Electrophysiological Evidence from Hindi
Provisionally accepted
- 1Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Rupnagar, India
- 2Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society, Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany
- 3New Delhi Institute of Management, New Delhi, India
- 4Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management (GITAM), Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India
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Ergativity marks subject arguments as agents of a transitive event and thereby signals verbal transitivity and influences language comprehension. We report here on an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study in Hindi, in which we investigated this interconnection to ascertain whether the ergative case as a processing cue and its ERP correlates can be generalized across and within ergative languages. The case marking on the subject argument (ergative or nominative case) in our study either matched or mismatched with the transitivity of the light verb (transitive or intransitive) in compound light verb constructions. Ergative case violations due to an intransitive light verb evoked an N400 effect, whereas nominative case violations due to a transitive light verb elicited a P600 effect. The results reveal neurophysiological dif-ferences in the processing of ergative and nominative case alignment modulated by the transitivity of the light verbs. The findings highlight the need for cross-linguistic research to aim beyond universality and elucidate the mechanism underlying the processing of language-specific structural variations.
Keywords: case, ergativity, light verbs, N400, P600, Transitivity
Received: 30 Jun 2025; Accepted: 16 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Mathew, Muralikrishnan, Gulati, Bhattamishra and Choudhary. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: R. Muralikrishnan
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