Do sentences with unaccusative verbs involve syntactic movement? Evidence from neuroimaging.

This study focuses on the neural processing of English sentences containing unergative, unaccusative and transitive verbs. We demonstrate common responses in bilateral superior temporal gyri in response to listening to sentences containing unaccusative and transitive verbs compared to unergative verbs; we did not detect any activation that was specific to unaccusatives. Our findings indicate that the neural processing of unaccusative and transitive verbs is highly similar, and very different from the processing of unergative verbs. We discuss the consequences of these results for the linguistic analysis of movement phenomena.