Feel between the lines: Implied emotion from combinatorial language processing

During reading, people not only retrieve meaning from individual words, they also combine words into multi-word meaning representation and derive inference from it. In single word studies, action verb meaning (kick) is understood through the activation of motor areas, typically interpreted as showing the necessity of these sensori motor regions as part of a semantic circuit for language comprehension (Pulvermüller & Fadiga, 2010). But it remains unclear how this association-based theory scales up to understanding sentence meaning and how the semantic circuit subserves inference making at the sentence level