Table 1.

Types of Linguistic Violation

Linguistic violation	Explanation	Example
(1) None	Baseline condition.	Every morning at breakfast the boys would eat toast and jam.”
(2) Real-world pragmatic violation	The critical verb was replaced by another verb taken from another sentence scenario that was incongruous with the entire preceding context, with respect to real-world knowledge.	Every morning at breakfast the boys would plant the flowers.”
(3) ^ Animacy Semantic-thematic violation	The animate NP that is assigned the role of Agent by the critical verb was replaced by an inanimate NP.	Every morning at breakfast the eggs would eat toast and jam.”
(4) Morphosyntactic inflectional violation	The verb was changed either to violate subject-verb agreement or by using a finite in place of an infinitival verb.	Every morning at breakfast the boys would eats toast and jam.”

^{^}Our use of the term animacy semantic-thematic violation conveys the fact that, in all of these sentences, an inanimate subject NP was used together with verbs that assign the role of Agent (animate in nature) to their preceding subject noun in simple English sentences (Agent-Theme or Experiencer-Theme verbs), thus violating the thematic structure of these verbs.

In the examples, the critical verb to which the hemodynamic response was modeled, is underlined.