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Event structures drive semantic structural priming, not thematic roles: Evidence from idioms and light verbs
Abstract
What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub-predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles.
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The syntactic structure of a sentence is usually a strong predictor of its meaning: Each argument noun phrase (i.e., Subject and Object) should map onto exactly one thematic role (i.e., Agent and Patient, respectively). Some constructions, however, are exceptions to this pattern. This paper investigates how the syntactic structure of an utterance contributes to its construal, using ditransitive English light verb constructions, such as “Nils gave a hug to his brother,” as an example of such mismatches: Hugging is a two-role event, but the ditransitive syntactic structure suggests a three-role event. Data from an eye-tracking experiment and behavioral categorization data reveal that listeners learn to categorize sentences according to the number of thematic roles they convey, independent of their syntax. Light verb constructions, however, seem to form a category of their own, in which the syntactic structure leads listeners down an initial incorrect assignment of thematic roles, from which they only partly recover. These results suggest an automatic influence of syntactic argument structure on semantic interpretation and event construal, even in highly frequent constructions.
Clearly, structural priming is a valuable tool for probing linguistic representation. But we don't think that the existing results provide strong support for Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) model, largely because the priming effects are more confusing and diverse than their theory would suggest. Fortunately, there are a number of other experimental tools available, and linguists are increasingly making use of them.
Structural priming implies that speakers/listeners unknowingly re-use syntactic structure over subsequent utterances. Previous research found that structural priming is reliably enhanced when lexical content is repeated (lexical boost effect). A widely held assumption is that structure-licensing heads enjoy a privileged role in lexically boosting structural priming. The present comprehension-to-production priming experiments investigated whether head-constituents (verbs) versus non-head constituents (argument nouns) contribute differently to boosting ditransitive structure priming in English. Experiment 1 showed that lexical boosts from repeated agent or recipient nouns (and to a lesser extent, repeated theme nouns) were comparable to those from repeated verbs. Experiments 2 and 3 found that increasing numbers of content words shared between primes and targets led to increasing magnitudes of structural priming (again, with no ‘special’ contribution of verb-repetition). We conclude that lexical boost effects are not diagnostic of lexically-specific syntactic representations, even though such representations are supported by other types of evidence.
Variations in postverbal constituent ordering have been attributed to both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness), although few studies compare the two factors explicitly. Through corpus analysis and experimentation, we demonstrate that both factors simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. While past investigations of these factors have focused on their effects in language comprehension, we argue that postponing heavy and new constituents facilitates processes of planning and production.
Cambridge Core - Asian Language and Linguistics - The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics - edited by Mineharu Nakayama
Language is characterised by broad and predictable mappings between meaning and syntactic form. Transitive sentences typically encode two-participant events while ditransitives typically encode three-participant events. Light-verb constructions, however, systematically violate these mappings; for example, some have ditransitive syntax (‘Romeo is giving Juliet a kiss’) but describe what appear to be agent–patient events (Romeo kissing Juliet). We used a conceptual sorting task to explore whether this non-canonical mapping influenced the interpretation of these sentences. Participants were trained to sort events by the number of thematic roles they encoded. After a training phase with only pictures, they sorted a mix of pictures and written sentences, including transitive agent–patient sentences, ditransitive source–theme–goal sentences and ditransitive light-verb constructions. Events described by light-verb constructions were most often grouped with agent–patient events but were sometimes grouped with source–theme–goal events. A control condition using the transitive/intransitive alternation for joint action verbs (e.g., ‘meet’) demonstrates that this is not attributable to misconstruing the task as syntactic sorting. We conclude that non-canonical mappings between meaning and form can affect event construal, but syntactic form does not solely determine the construal that is chosen.
This paper identifies several serious problems with the widespread use of ANOVAs for the analysis of categorical outcome variables such as forced-choice variables, question-answer accuracy, choice in production (e.g. in syntactic priming research), et cetera. I show that even after applying the arcsine-square-root transformation to proportional data, ANOVA can yield spurious results. I discuss conceptual issues underlying these problems and alternatives provided by modern statistics. Specifically, I introduce ordinary logit models (i.e. logistic regression), which are well-suited to analyze categorical data and offer many advantages over ANOVA. Unfortunately, ordinary logit models do not include random effect modeling. To address this issue, I describe mixed logit models (Generalized Linear Mixed Models for binomially distributed outcomes, Breslow & Clayton, 1993), which combine the advantages of ordinary logit models with the ability to account for random subject and item effects in one step of analysis. Throughout the paper, I use a psycholinguistic data set to compare the different statistical methods.
In three experiments, we investigate whether speakers tend to perseverate in the assignment of emphasis to concepts with particular thematic roles across utterances. Participants matched prime sentences involving clefts (e.g., Het is de cowboy die hij slaat, “It is the cowboy that he is hitting”) to pictures and then described unrelated transitive events. Participants were more likely to produce a passive after a cleft that emphasised the patient than after a cleft that emphasised the agent. Because prime and target sentences are syntactically unrelated, our study demonstrated nonsyntactic structural priming. We propose that speakers use such priming to facilitate the construction of coherent discourse.
Theoretical linguists have traditionally relied on linguistic intuitions such as gram- maticality judgments for their data. But the massive growth of computer-readable texts and recordings, the availability of cheaper, more powerful computers and soft- ware, and the development of new probabilistic models for language have now made the spontaneous use of language in natural settings a rich and easily accessible alter- native source of data.
Surprisingly, many linguists believe that such ‘usage data’ are irrelevant to the theory of grammar. Four problems are repeatedly brought up in the critiques of usage data—
1. correlated factors seeming to support reductive theories,
2. pooled data invalidating grammatical inference,
3. syntactic choices reducing to lexical biases, and
4. cross-corpus differences undermining corpus studies.
Presenting a case study of work on the English dative alternation, we show first, that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are deeply flawed and seriously underes- timate the space of grammatical possibility, and second, that the four problems in the critique of usage data are empirical issues that can be resolved by using modern statistical theory and modelling strategies widely used in other fields.
The new models allow linguistic theory to solve more difficult problems than it has in the past, and to build convergent projects with psychology, computer science, and allied fields of cognitive science.
Most theories of human language production assume that generating a sentence involves several stages, including an initial stage where the prelinguistic message is determined and a subsequent stage of grammatical encoding. However, it is contentious whether grammatical encoding involves separate stages of grammatical-function assignment and linearization. To address this question, we examined the mapping between the message level and grammatical encoding in two structural priming experiments in which German speakers choose between three different structures expressing ditransitive events. Although speakers showed a tendency to repeat the order of constituents (noun phrase-prepositional phrase, NP-PP, vs. NP-NP), they were additionally primed to repeat the order of thematic roles when constituent structure was constant (NP RECIPIENT -NP THEME vs. NP THEME -NP RECIPIENT ). Experiment 2 found that the latter effect could not be due to persistence of the order of phrases referring to animate and inanimate entities. These results suggest a direct mapping of thematic roles to word order, consistent with a model in which the message is mapped onto syntactic structure in a single stage.
Linear mixed-effects models (LMEMs) have become increasingly prominent in psycholinguistics and related areas. However, many researchers do not seem to appreciate how random effects structures affect the generalizability of an analysis. Here, we argue that researchers using LMEMs for confirmatory hypothesis testing should minimally adhere to the standards that have been in place for many decades. Through theoretical arguments and Monte Carlo simulation, we show that LMEMs generalize best when they include the maximal random effects structure justified by the design. The generalization performance of LMEMs including data-driven random effects structures strongly depends upon modeling criteria and sample size, yielding reasonable results on moderately-sized samples when conservative criteria are used, but with little or no power advantage over maximal models. Finally, random-intercepts-only LMEMs used on within-subjects and/or within-items data from populations where subjects and/or items vary in their sensitivity to experimental manipulations always generalize worse than separate F1 and F2 tests, and in many cases, even worse than F1 alone. Maximal LMEMs should be the ‘gold standard’ for confirmatory hypothesis testing in psycholinguistics and beyond.
We challenge the predominant view of the English dative alternation, which takes all alternating verbs to have two meanings: a caused possession meaning realized by the double object variant and a caused motion meaning realized by the to variant. Instead, we argue that verbs like give and sell only have a caused possession meaning, while verbs like throw and send have both caused motion and caused possession meanings. We show that the caused possession meaning may be realized by both variants. Concomitantly, we argue that verbs like give, even in the to variant, lack a conceptual path constituent, and instead have a caused possession meaning which can be understood as the bringing about of a ‘have’ relation. We reassess evidence for alternative approaches adduced from inference patterns and verb–argument combinations and demonstrate how our verb-sensitive analysis, when combined with an account of variant choice, provides a more insightful explanation of this data, while having wider coverage. Our investigation affirms proposals that a verb's own meaning plays a key role in determining its argument realization options. To conclude, we consider the crosslinguistic implications of our study, attempting to explain why so many languages lack a true dative alternation.
This study asked whether bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure for the sentences that they produce. It reports an experiment in which a Polish–English bilingual and a confederate of the experimenter took turns to describe pictures to each other and to find those pictures in an array. The confederate produced a Polish active, passive, or conjoined noun phrase, or an active sentence with object–verb–subject order (OVS sentence). The participant responded in English, and tended to produce a passive sentence more often after a passive or an OVS sentence than after a conjoined noun phrase or active sentence. Passives and OVS sentences are syntactically unrelated but share information structure, in that both assign emphasis to the patient. We therefore argued that bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure during speech.
Verbs that are similar in meaning tend to occur in the same syntactic structures. For example, give and hand, which denote transfer of possession, both appear in the prepositional-object construction: "The child gave/handed the ball to the dog." We can call the child a "giver" in one case and a "hander" in the other, or we can refer to her more generally as the agent, or doer of the action. Similarly, the dog can be called the recipient, and the ball, the theme. These generalized notions of agent, recipient, and theme are known as thematic roles. An important theoretical question for linguists and psycholinguists is what the set of thematic roles is. Are there a small number of very broad roles, perhaps with each one mapping onto a single canonical syntactic position? Or are there many distinct roles, several mapping to the same syntactic position but conveying subtly different meanings? We investigate this question across eleven structural priming experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (total N = 2914), asking whether speakers treat the thematic roles recipient and destination (i.e., location or spatial goal) as interchangeable, suggesting the broad role of goal, or distinct, suggesting two separate roles. To do so, we look for priming between dative sentences (e.g., "The man gave the ball to the dog"), which have a recipient role (dog), and locative sentences (e.g., "The man loaded hay onto the wagon"), which instead have a destination role (wagon). Our pattern of findings confirms that thematic role mappings can be primed independent of syntactic structure, lexical content, and animacy. However, we find that this priming does not extend from destinations to recipients (or vice versa), providing evidence that these two roles are distinct.
The present study investigates the role of abstract event structure in Chinese speakers’ language production. Two experiments adopted a structural priming paradigm. Three types of prime sentences which varied in their conceptual overlap with target events and violated the normal positions (Experiment 1) or order (Experiment 2) of conceptual contents of motion events were designed to test whether they are potent enough to induce Chinese speakers to change their preference in encoding motion events. Results showed that conceptual overlap influenced Chinese speakers’ choices of conceptual information (manner and/or path mention), illustrating that abstract event structure is activated at the stage of Message Planning, consistent with the findings obtained from English speakers. The results from both language groups indicate that the activation of event structure during preverbal Message Planning is a cross-linguistic phenomenon. In addition, the present study also finds that Chinese speakers’ mapping of event structure to linguistic form has its own characteristics, illustrating that the process of mapping conceptual structure to linguistic form is language-specific. We argue that this language-specific encoding of motion events provides evidence that Chinese is an “equipollently-framed language”.
Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability – whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists’ representational assumptions. We challenge this division of labor, by arguing that structural priming provides an implicit method of investigating linguistic representations that should end the current reliance on acceptability judgments. Moreover, structural priming has now reached sufficient methodological maturity to provide substantial evidence about such representations. We argue that evidence from speakers’ tendency to repeat their own and others’ structural choices supports a linguistic architecture involving a single ‘shallow’ level of syntax that is connected to a semantic level containing information about quantification, thematic relations, and information structure, as well as to a phonological level. Many of the linguistic distinctions that are often used to support complex (or multi-level) syntactic structure are instead captured by semantics; however, the syntactic level includes some specification of ‘missing’ elements that are not realized at the phonological level. We also show that structural priming provides evidence about the consistency of representations across languages and about language development. In sum, we propose that structural priming provides a new basis for understanding the nature of language.
We performed an exhaustive meta-analysis of 73 peer-reviewed journal articles on syntactic priming from the seminal Bock (1986) paper through 2013. Extracting the effect size for each experiment and condition, where the effect size is the log odds ratio of the frequency of the primed structure X to the frequency of the unprimed structure Y, we found a robust effect of syntactic priming with an average weighted odds ratio of 1.67 when there is no lexical overlap and 3.26 when there is. That is, a construction X which occurs 50% of the time in the absence of priming would occur 63% if primed without lexical repetition and 77% of the time if primed with lexical repetition. The syntactic priming effect is robust across several different construction types and languages, and we found strong effects of lexical overlap on the size of the priming effect as well as interactions between lexical repetition and temporal lag and between lexical repetition and whether the priming occurred within or across languages. We also analyzed the distribution of p-values across experiments in order to estimate the average statistical power of experiments in our sample and to assess publication bias. Analyzing a subset of experiments in which the primary result of interest is whether a particular structure showed a priming effect, we did not find evidence of major p-hacking and the studies appear to have acceptable statistical power: 82%. However, analyzing a subset of experiments that focus not just on whether syntactic priming exists but on how syntactic priming is moderated by other variables (such as repetition of words in prime and target, the location of the testing room, and the memory of the speaker), we found that such studies are, on average, underpowered with estimated average power of 53%. Using a subset of 45 papers from our sample for which we received raw data, we estimated subject and item variation and give recommendations for appropriate sample size for future syntactic priming studies.
This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.
The present study addressed open questions about the nature of sentence production deficits in agrammatic aphasia. In two structural priming experiments, 13 aphasic and 13 age-matched control speakers repeated visually- and auditorily-presented prime sentences, and then used visually-presented word arrays to produce dative sentences. Experiment 1 examined whether agrammatic speakers form structural and thematic representations during sentence production, whereas Experiment 2 tested the lasting effects of structural priming in lags of two and four sentences. Results of Experiment 1 showed that, like unimpaired speakers, the aphasic speakers evinced intact structural priming effects, suggesting that they are able to generate such representations. Unimpaired speakers also showed reliable thematic priming effects in all conditions; agrammatic speakers did so as well in most experimental conditions, suggesting that access to thematic representations may be intact. Results of Experiment 2 showed structural priming effects of comparable magnitude for aphasic and unimpaired speakers. In addition, both groups showed lasting structural priming effects in both lag conditions, consistent with implicit learning accounts. In both experiments, aphasic speakers with more severe language impairments exhibited larger priming effects, consistent with the "inverse preference" prediction of implicit learning accounts. The findings indicate that agrammatic speakers are sensitive to structural priming across levels of representation and that such effects are lasting, suggesting that structural priming may be beneficial for the treatment of sentence production deficits in agrammatism.
It is now well established that the production (or perception) of one sentence is capable of increasing the probability that the speaker will subsequently produce another utterance of the same or a related type. This phenomenon, which we shall refer to as’ sentence level priming’, has generally been taken to reflect a facilitation of syntactic processes and/or representations as a result of their repeated occurrence. Whilst it is clear that various conceptual features of the utterance also play a role in the production process, it has generally been concluded (e.g. Bock 1986; Bock, Loebell, & Morey 1992) that these do not underlie the priming phenomenon and that they exert independent additive effects on the likelihood of production of a particular sentence type.
Online data collection has begun to revolutionize the behavioral sciences. However, conducting carefully controlled behavioral experiments online introduces a number of new of technical and scientific challenges. The project described in this paper, psiTurk, is an open-source platform which helps researchers develop experiment designs which can be conducted over the Internet. The tool primarily interfaces with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a popular crowd-sourcing labor market. This paper describes the basic architecture of the system and introduces new users to the overall goals. psiTurk aims to reduce the technical hurdles for researchers developing online experiments while improving the transparency and collaborative nature of the behavioral sciences.
The current study addressed the relation between syntactic and semantic processes during language production in 5- and 6-year-old children. A priming paradigm was used to examine children's production of passives in describing transitive scenes (target pictures) following exposure to the experimenter's sentences (primes). The key question was whether the tendency to repeat the syntactic form of the prime was affected by the animacy features in the prime and the target picture. In Experiment 1, children heard either passive or active primes with varied animacy configurations (e.g., animate patient/inanimate agent vs. inanimate patient/animate agent). The animacy features of the prime matched those of the target. Similar to prior studies, results showed a greater use of passives following passive, as opposed to active, primes. Critically, the difference between the two priming conditions varied as a function of animacy; it was larger when the prime and the target included an animate patient/inanimate agent than with the reversed animacy. In Experiment 2, the animacy configuration of the prime either matched or did not match that of the target. Results showed a greater likelihood of producing a passive when the target picture contained an animate patient versus an inanimate patient, and this effect was stronger when the prime had the same animacy features. The findings indicating that syntactic priming is moderated by animacy are discussed in the broader context of understanding the role of semantics in guiding the choice of syntactic structure.
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The present study investigates whether two types of word combinations (free combinations and collocations) differ in terms of processing by testing Howarth's Continuum Model based on word combination typologies from a phraseological tradition. A visual semantic judgment task was administered to advanced Swedish learners of English ( n = 27) and native English‐speaking controls ( n = 38). Reaction times and error rates were recorded for free combinations, collocations, and baseline items. There was a processing cost for collocations compared to free combinations, for both groups of participants. This cost likely stems from the semantically semi‐transparent nature of collocations as they are defined in the phraseological tradition. Furthermore, phrasal frequency based on corpus values also predicted reaction times. These results lend initial support to the Continuum Model from a processing perspective and suggest that degree of semantic transparency together with phrasal frequency plays an important role in collocational processing.
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This book surveys the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields and offers a new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the conclusions of early generative linguistics: that language can be a valuable entrée into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is interdisciplinary. The book proposes that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. This shift in basic architecture allows for a reconception of mental grammar and how it is learned. The book aims to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception, the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, this book offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics.
Abstract Three experiments are reported that studied the priming of word order in German. Experiment 1 confirmed results obtained by Yamashita & Chang (2006) who demonstrated priming of the order of verb arguments in Japanese. However, in these Japanese as well as in our German data, order of noun phrases and order of thematic roles was confounded. In Experiment 2, we therefore aimed at disentangling the impact of these two possible factors. By using primes that differed from targets in phrase structure but were parallel with regard to the order of thematic roles, we nevertheless found priming demonstrating the critical impact of thematic roles, similar to results obtained by Cai, Pickering, and Branigan (2012) for Mandarin Chinese. Experiment 3 replicated the priming effects from Experiments 1 and 2 within participants and revealed no evidence for a modulation of priming by phrase structure. Consequently, our findings suggest that word order priming crucially depends on the structural outline of thematic roles rather than on the linearisation of phrases.
We report four structural priming experiments investigating the syntactic and semantic processes involved in producing coerced and full-form sentences (e.g., The bricklayer began the wall vs. The bricklayer began building the wall). Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated priming for syntactic structure across sentences that involved the same coercing verb (e.g., began). Experiment 1 (and the combined analysis of Experiments 1 and 2) further demonstrated priming for semantic structure when syntactic structure was controlled. Experiment 3 demonstrated repetition of coerced sentences when prime and target used the same coercing verb but not different coercing verbs. Experiment 4 demonstrated repetition of coerced sentences both when the prime and target involved the same (lexically unrealized) coerced action (e.g., building) and when they did not, although repetition was stronger when they did. We argue that speakers use distinct mappings from semantic to syntactic structure when producing coerced and full-form sentences, and propose an account of how a model of language production might incorporate these mappings.
This priming study investigates the role of conceptual structure during language production, probing whether English speakers are sensitive to the structure of the event encoded by a prime sentence. In two experiments, participants read prime sentences aloud before describing motion events. Primes differed in 1) syntactic frame, 2) degree of lexical and conceptual overlap with target events, and 3) distribution of event components within frames. Results demonstrate that conceptual overlap between primes and targets led to priming of (a) the information that speakers chose to include in their descriptions of target events, (b) the way that information was mapped to linguistic elements, and (c) the syntactic structures that were built to communicate that information. When there was no conceptual overlap between primes and targets, priming was not successful. We conclude that conceptual structure is a level of representation activated during priming, and that it has implications for both Message Planning and Linguistic Formulation.
Recent work by Bresnan and colleagues (Bresnan 2007, Bresnan et al. 2007, Bresnan and Nikitina 2007) has argued that double object and prepositional dative constructions are essentially identical, the choice between them being conditioned by various factors. I argue against this conclusion, showing that the grammar clearly distinguishes double object from prepositional dative constructions. Under certain circumstances, the first object of a double object construction can shift to the right, with the preposition to appearing, but the grammar still distinguishes this from a prepositional dative construction that looks identical on the surface. The phenomena that I investigate are scope interactions with quantifiers and locative inversion. In addition, the rightward reordering operations investigated here indicate that constraints on variable binding, including weak crossover, must be formulated in terms of linear order rather than hierarchy.
In this article, we explore the interaction of the verb again with double object constructions and the corresponding NP+PP constructions. The restitutive reading that again gives rise to in combination with these predicates supports an analysis of double object constructions according to which they contain a small clause with a head predicate HAVE, and an analysis of the corresponding NP+PP constructions that is not transformationally related and varies according to the verb contained in the structures
In two previous papers (Lombardi & Potter, 1992; Potter & Lombardi, 1990) we reported evidence that immediate recall of a sentence requires regeneration from the message level, rather than from a verbatim representation. However, participants tended to reproduce the surface syntax even when there were two meaning-equivalent surface structures available (e.g., for dative verbs, “gave the letter to her mother,” “gave her mother the letter”). In three experiments we tested the hypothesis that this verbatim bias is the result of syntactic priming (Bock, 1986). In Experiment 1 single sentences were recalled; the prime sentence preceded the target dative sentence. In Experiments 2 and 3 two-clause sentences were recalled; the second clause served as a prime that had been perceived but not yet recalled when the first clause was produced, or vice versa. When the prime sentence or clause was a dative that mismatched the surface structure of the target there was an increase in changes to the alternate (primed) structure in recall of the target, compared with control primes. These results support the hypothesis that simply perceiving a sentence is enough to prime its surface syntactic structure, contributing to verbatim recall.
Activation processes appear to have an important impact on the mechanisms of language use, including those responsible for syntactic structure in speech. Some implications of this claim for theories of language performance were examined with a syntactic priming procedure. On each priming trial, subjects produced a priming sentence in one of several syntactic forms. They then viewed an unrelated event in a picture and described it in one sentence. The probability of a particular syntactic form being used in the description increased when that form had occurred in the prime, under presentation conditions that minimized subjects' attention to their speech, to the syntactic features of the priming sentences, and to connections between the priming sentences and the subsequent pictures. This syntactic repetition effect suggests that sentence formulation processes are somewhat inertial and subject to such probabilistic factors as the frequency or recency of use of particular structural forms. Two further experiments showed that this effect was not appreciably modified by variations in certain conceptual characteristics of sentences, and all three experiments found evidence that the effects of priming were specific to features of sentence form, independent of sentence content. The empirical isolability of structural features from conceptual characteristics of successive utterances is consistent with the assumption that some syntactic processes are organized into a functionally independent subsystem.
This paper is based on the findings of a corpus-based study of contemporary Australian English. It is argued that tedative alternation (the typical association between indirect object sentences and sentences containing a prepositional phrase with to or for) cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by appealing solely to such semantic/pragmatic notions as “affectedness”, “indirect-objectiness”, and “iconic distance”. Central to an understanding of such alternation are informational factors. The influence of the central informational variable of “accessibility” is examined, along with that of the related variables of end-weight, pronounhood, and definiteness, and relevant frequencies from the corpus are presented. The indirect object and prepositional constructions are noted to contrast in terms of the sharpness with which the NPs representing “receiver” and “entity” are differentiated within them.
This paper argues that double-object verbs decompose into two heads, an external-argument-selecting cause predicate (vCAUSE) and a prepositional element, PHAVE. Two primary types of argument are presented. First, a consideration of the well-known Oerhle's generalization effects in English motivate such a decomposition, in combination with a consideration of idioms in ditransitive structures. These facts mitigate strongly against a Transform approach to the dative alternation, like that of Larson 1988, and point towards an Alternative Projection approach, similar in many respects to that of Pesetsky 1995. Second, the PHAVE prepositional element is identified with the prepositional component of verbal have, treated in the literature by Benveniste 1966; Freeze 1992; Kayne 1993; Guéron 1995. Languages without PHAVE do not allow possessors to c-command possessees, and show no evidence of a double-object construction, in which Goals c-command Themes. On the current account, these two facts receive the same explanation: PHAVE does not form part of the inventory of morphosyntactic primitives of these languages.
Although the organization of first language (L1) and second language (L2) lexicosemantic information has been extensively studied in the bilingual literature, little evidence exists concerning how syntactic information associated with words is represented across languages. The present study examines the shared or independent nature of the representation of verb argument structure in the bilingual mental lexicon and the contribution of constituent order and thematic role information in these representations. In three production tasks, Greek (L1) advanced learners of English (L2) generated an L1 prime structure (Experiment 1: prepositional object [PO] and double object [DO] structures; Experiment 2: PO, DO, and intransitive structures; Experiment 3: PO, DO, locative, and “provide (someone) with (something)” structures) before completing an L2 target structure (PO or DO only). Experiment 1 showed L1-to-L2 syntactic priming; participants tended to reuse L1 structure when producing L2 utterances. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this tendency was contingent on the combination of both syntactic structure and thematic roles up to the first postverbal argument. Based on these findings, we outline a model of shared representations of syntactic and thematic information for L1 and L2 verbs in the bilingual lexicon.
As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired 'role hierarchies'. By examining occurrences of the 'same' verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.