Table 1.

Example of one quartet of the thematic role violations and their baseline in the original Dutch version and their English translation (depicted in italics).

Condition	Structure	Sentence
Baseline	NP–V–NP	Fred eet een boterham…
		(Fred eats a sandwich…)
	NP–V–PP	Fred eet in een restaurant…
		(Fred eats in a restaurant…)
Thematic role violation	NP–V–NP	Fred eet een restaurant…
		(Fred eats a restaurant…)
	NP–V–PP	Fred eet in een boterham…
		(Fred eats in a sandwich…)

In the thematic role violations the incrementally earlier syntactic constraints impose a certain thematic role onto the critical word, which conflicts with the plausible semantic-thematic role. The critical words are depicted in bold.