Yoonsang Song1 & Ryan K. Y. Lai2 - OSF

AMLAP 2020 September 5, 2020

Syntactic representations encode grammatical functions: evidence from structural priming in Cantonese

Yoonsang Song1 & Ryan K. Y. Lai2 1University of Hong Kong

2UC Santa Barbara

Introduction: Issue

• Do the mapping between grammatical functions and thematic roles persists across utterances? • GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS: structural (or syntactic) relationships among a sentence’s part

• e.g., subject, direct object, indirect object, oblique

• THEMATIC ROLES: semantic relationships among among a sentence’s part

• e.g., agent, patient (theme), goal, source, location, etc.

Introduction: Background

• Each syntactic construction can be defined by its unique mapping between grammatical functions and thematic roles.

• Priming of any syntactic construction involves the potential priming of mapping between grammatical functions and thematic roles.

Jason punched Mike.

Agent Patient

Subject Direct Object

Mike was punched by Jason.

Patient Agent

Subject Oblique

Active Construction Passive Construction

Introduction: Background cont’d

• The role of such mapping in structural priming is, however, still questionable, given other important sources of structural priming.

• Sentences in the same syntactic construction share: • Phrasal constituent structure (e.g., [S NP [VP V NP]]

• Information structure (e.g., emphasis on patient)

• Thematic role order (e.g., agent–theme–recipient)

Present Study: Research Question

• Do topic object-subject-verb active (Topic-OSV) sentences prime standard active sentences or passive sentences in Cantonese? • In Cantonese, standard active sentences are in subject-verb-object (SVO) order.

• Topic-OSV sentences are derived by fronting the direct object of standard active sentences and attaching the topic marker ne to it.

Go lengmougowaagaa waak-gandraw-PROGCL artist CL young.model

‘The artist is drawing the young model.’

Go lengmou go waagaa waak-gandraw-PROGCL artistCLyoung.model

‘The young model, the artist is drawing.’

Standard Active (SVO) Topic-OSV Active

Standard Passive

Go lengmou go waagaa waak-gandraw-PROGCL artistCLyoung.model

‘The young model is being drawn by the artist.’

beiby

neTOP

Present Study: Possible Outcomes

• If mapping between grammatical function and thematic roles is a major sources of structural priming, the Topic-OSV sentences should be able to prime the standard active construction.

• Otherwise, the Topic-OSV sentences should prime standard passive sentences via shared information structure and/or the linear order of thematic roles.

Syntactic Construction

Grammatical Function–Thematic Role Mapping

Constituent Structure

Information Structure

Thematic Role Order

Prime Topic-OSV subject–agent direct object–patient

[NP [NP [VP V ]]] patient topic patient–agent

Topic-Passive subject–patient direct object–agent

[NP [VP PP V] patient-topic patient–agent

Target standard active subject–agent direct object–patient

[NP [VP V NP] agent-topic agent–patient

standard passive subject–patient direct object–agent

[NP [VP PP V] patient-topic patient–agent

Method

• Participants: 30 native speakers of Cantonese (17 female; mean age = 23, SD = 3)

• Materials & Design • 24 experimental sets and 48 filler sets

• Three priming conditions:

• Topic-OSV

• Topic-Passive

• Baseline (a noun phrase)

• Two expected target structures:

• Standard active

• Standard passive

Method cont’d

• Procedure

Results

Percentage of active, passive, and other responses in each prime condition

0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Baseline Topic-OSV Topic-Passive

60%48%58%

38%49%38%

ActiveOtherPassive

Prime Condition

Target Construction

9

Significant priming from Topic-OSV to

standard active

Discussion

• Significant priming from Topic-OSV sentences to standard active sentences:

• This priming effect cannot be attributed to the constituent structure, information structure, or linear thematic role order of the prime sentences.

• Priming of grammatical function–thematic role mapping can be strong enough to override priming of information structure and thematic role order.

• Our finding support to language processing models incorporating grammatical functions in an explicit way (e.g., Bock and Levelt, 1994; Cai et al., 2012)

• Our data are more easily explained by syntactic theories that incorporate grammatical functions in a direct way, such as Lexical-Functional grammar (Kaplan & Bresnan, 1995).