EXPRESS: When the independence of syntactic representation meets the sentence processing of Mandarin: Evidence from syntactic priming

2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110449
Author(s):  
Keshu Xiang ◽  
Hui Chang ◽  
Lu Sun
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Syntactic Priming ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Syntactic Representation ◽  
Target Experiment ◽  
Prepositional Object

There is no consensus on whether syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Mandarin. In four experiments, we adopted the syntactic priming paradigm to investigate the independence of syntactic representation in Mandarin. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the priming effects of double object construction (DO) and prepositional object construction (PO) with the ditransitive verb being repeated across the prime and target. Experiment 1 showed two-way priming effects of DO and PO. Experiment 2 showed that the syntactic priming effects persisted regardless of whether the semantic features (animacy of the Theme) matched across the prime and target or not. Furthermore, such effects persisted in Experiments 3 and 4 where the ditransitive verb across the prime and target was not repeated. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that syntactic/semantic independence is universal and favored over the traditional Chinese grammar account, which claims that the syntactic representation of Mandarin is not independent of the semantic representation.

On the inherent semantic meaning of double object Latinate verbs in English in modern and historical perspective *

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Sówka-Pietraszewska
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Time Span ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Prepositional Object ◽  
The One

Abstract This paper shows the realization of arguments of Latinate double object verbs and an analysis of their inherent semantic meaning in the Late Middle English and early Modern English periods, hence in the time-span when they were borrowed into English. The main aim of this paper is to show that although Latinate verbs occur in a construction with what seems to be an allative preposition, not all of them lexicalize movement in the inherent meanings. In contrast, some Latinate verbs lexicalize only a caused possession. What is more, this paper shows that the caused possession Latinate verbs select a different variant of prepositional object construction than the one selected by Latinate verbs lexicalizing movement.

scholarly journals ‘Give it him and then I’ll give you money for it’. The dative alternation in Contemporary British English

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
Juan Lorente Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Double Object ◽  
British English ◽  
Double Object Construction ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ditransitive Verbs ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Prepositional Object ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon

‘Dative alternation’ refers to a linguistic phenomenon related to ditransitive verbs, that is, verbs which take a subject and two objects referring to a theme and a recipient. In English, the phenomenon offers the possibility of alternation between a prepositional object construction (PREP), where the recipient is encoded as a prepositional phrase (give it to him), a double object construction (DOC), where the recipient precedes the theme (give him it) and an alternative double object construction (altDOC), where the theme takes precedence over the recipient (give it him), the latter constrained to dialectal usage. Even though this alternation has been extensively addressed in the literature, few studies have considered language-external factors in determining the choice of encoding. This paper analyses the distribution of ditransitive forms in competition in contemporary British English from a twofold perspective, shedding some light on the distribution of these variants across time, along with the study of PREP, DOC and altDOC in relation to their sociolinguistic dimension. The corpus used as source of evidence is the British National Corpus, a 100-million-word collection of both written and spoken language from a wide range of sources.

scholarly journals Lexically-mediated syntactic priming effects in comprehension: Sources of facilitation

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (9) ◽  
pp. 2176-2196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen M Tooley ◽  
Martin J Pickering ◽  
Matthew J Traxler
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Target Sentence ◽  
Syntactic Priming ◽  
Thematic Role ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
Role Assignment ◽  
Mediated Priming ◽  
Structural Processing

The nature of the facilitation occurring when sentences share a verb and syntactic structure (i.e., lexically-mediated syntactic priming) has not been adequately addressed in comprehension. In four eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the degree to which lexical, syntactic, thematic, and verb form repetition contribute to facilitated target sentence processing. Lexically-mediated syntactic priming was observed when primes and targets shared a verb and abstract syntactic structure, regardless of the ambiguity of the prime. In addition, repeated thematic role assignment resulted in syntactic priming (to a lesser degree), and verb form repetition facilitated lexical rather than structural processing. We conclude that priming in comprehension involves lexically associated abstract syntactic representations, and facilitation of verb and thematic role processes. The results also indicate that syntactic computation errors during prime processing are not necessary for lexically-mediated priming to occur during target processing. This result is inconsistent with an error-driven learning account of lexically-mediated syntactic priming effects.

I gave it him — on the motivation of the ‘alternative double object construction’ in varieties of British English

2007 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Gast
Keyword(s):  
Clause Structure ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Double Object ◽  
British English ◽  
Double Object Construction ◽  
Second Languages ◽  
Language Discourse ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Prepositional Object ◽  
Ditransitive Constructions

Three ditransitive constructions can be found in varieties of British English: (i) the ‘prepositional object construction’, where the recipient is encoded as a prepositional phrase (gave it to him); (ii) the ‘canonical double object construction’, where the recipient precedes the theme (gave him it); and (iii) the ‘alternative double object construction’, where the theme precedes the recipient (gave it him). The last of these constructions is typically found in (north)western varieties of British English when both objects are pronominal, and most of the relevant varieties have a ‘canonical’ ordering (REC > TH) when the theme is non-pronominal. Consequently, there seems to be an ‘inconsistency’ in the clause structure of the varieties in question. Using comparative and historical evidence, this article addresses the question of how this inconsistency can be explained. The ‘paradigmatic mismatch’ under discussion is shown to be a remnant of Old English clause structure which can also be observed in other verb second languages such as Modern German. It is argued to result from a tendency for both verb positions (finite/left and non-finite/right) to attract direct objects. This tendency is regarded as an effect of performance preferences in natural language discourse.

Lexical activation of cross-language syntactic priming

2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANGELIKI SALAMOURA ◽  
JOHN N. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Completion ◽  
Syntactic Priming ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Shared Representations ◽  
Lexical Activation ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Completion Task ◽  
Structural Preferences ◽  
Prepositional Object ◽  
Cross Language

Cross-language (L1-to-L2) syntactic priming is the repetition of utterance structure from one language to another independently of meaning and has motivated models of language-shared representations of L1-L2 equivalent structures (Salamoura and Williams, submitted; Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker and Pickering, submitted). These models assume that the phenomenon is the result of residual activation of syntactic features encoding verb structural preferences and they, therefore, predict its initiation by a single verb prime (cf. Pickering and Branigan, 1998, for L1). This prediction was confirmed in a sentence completion task where we obtained syntactic priming from L1 Dutch to L2 English with Prepositional Object (PO) and Double Object (DO) datives upon presentation of single Dutch verbs that take either PO or DO only.

Syntactic Priming Constrains Sentence Processing

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryellen C. Macdonald ◽  
Sarah P. Schuster
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Syntactic Priming

scholarly journals Locating variation in the dative alternation

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Biggs
Keyword(s):  
Double Object ◽  
British English ◽  
Double Object Construction ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Main Variety ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This paper investigates the structure of the dative alternation in dialects of Northwest British English. This includes theme passivization of apparent Double Object Constructions (It was given her). Detailed investigation shows that different dialects use distinct licensing strategies to derive the Theme passive structure. The main variety discussed is Liverpool English, where Theme passivisation is shown to derive from a prepositional dative with a null preposition. In contrast, Manchester English, a neighbouring variety, derives Theme passives of the Double Object Construction, via an Applicative configuration (Haddican 2010, Haddican and Holmberg 2012). The study shows that a range of syntactic properties and restrictions on a structure can be traced back to variation in the functional lexicon.

scholarly journals How well do similarity measures predict priming in abstract and concrete concepts?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Montefinese ◽  
Erin Michelle Buchanan ◽  
David Vinson
Keyword(s):  
Word Association ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Similarity Measures ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Association Strength ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Strategic Processes ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Concrete Concepts

Models of semantic representation predict that automatic priming is determined by associative and co-occurrence relations (i.e., spreading activation accounts), or to similarity in words' semantic features (i.e., featural models). Although, these three factors are correlated in characterizing semantic representation, they seem to tap different aspects of meaning. We designed two lexical decision experiments to dissociate these three different types of meaning similarity. For unmasked primes, we observed priming only due to association strength and not the other two measures; and no evidence for differences in priming for concrete and abstract concepts. For masked primes there was no priming regardless of the semantic relation. These results challenge theoretical accounts of automatic priming. Rather, they are in line with the idea that priming may be due to participants’ controlled strategic processes. These results provide important insight about the nature of priming and how association strength, as determined from word-association norms, relates to the nature of semantic representation.

Exploring epicentres empirically

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Th. Gries ◽  
Tobias Bernaisch
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Random Effects ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Indian English ◽  
British English ◽  
Double Object Construction ◽  
Deviation Analysis ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Object Construction

The present paper studies the dative alternation with GIVE, i.e. the alternation between the double-object construction (e.g. John gave Mary a book) and the prepositional dative (e.g. John gave a book to Mary), in relation to the norms underlying this constructional choice in six South Asian Englishes. Via Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis with Regression (MuPDAR) including random effects, we identify (i) factors triggering different constructional choices in South Asian Englishes in comparison to British English and (ii) the linguistic epicentre of English in South Asia with regard to the dative alternation. We are able to show that discourse accessibility of patient and recipient as well as pronominality of recipient are actuators of structural nativisation in South Asian Englishes and — in agreement with a more general sociolinguistic approach — find via a bottom-up approach that Indian English may be regarded as the linguistic epicentre of English for South Asia.

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