Psychological Mechanisms Involved In Language Production: Effects Of Animacy Matching Between Subjects Of Active Vs. Passive Priming And Target Sentences

The distinction between underlying and superficial linguistic structures is a staple ofmodern cognitive psychology. Despite increasingly diverse conceptions of syntacticrelations in linguistic theory, the received view in psycholinguistics has remained one inwhich the entities assigned to underlying relations may assume different surface relations.The present article examines this view in the context of language production and reviewsevidence that the disposition to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation is abasic feature of language use, suggesting that mappings from conceptual categories tosyntactic relations form a main support of the bridge from conception to language.Proceeding on this assumption, the article also evaluates competing accounts of themapping process in language production. The results argue against syntacticrelation-changing operations, but favor a division between meaning- and form-relatedmechanisms. This thesis is divided into six parts: Chapter One is an introduction, giving the background knowledge and the intendedgoal to be achieved. Chapter Two points out that substantive movement operations play no role asprocessing mechanisms in current psycholinguistic theories and then reviews thoseframeworks that allow a direct mapping to surface syntactic relations, abjuringtransformations of structure. To illustrate how direct mapping may operate in production,we adapt a scheme suggested in lexical-functional grammar. Two of the main tenets oflexical-functional grammar are alluded to in its name: the role of the lexicon is central, andgrammatical functions are seen as syntactically primitive. Chapter Three presents the question that we examine in this section has to do with aconceptual distinction that seems to enter into the functional integration process in a waythat favors a direct-mapping account of language use. We analyze the evidence frompsycholinguistic research, particularly from production research, for a connection betweensubject and animacy. Beyond the characterization of animacy itself, there are othercomplications in accounting for its link to subject. We selectively consider two differentways of analyzing the connection. The first concerns the relationship between animacy andthematic roles, and the second involves an interpretation of animacy in terms ofpredicability. Chapter Four states the research questions, makes hypotheses and surveys whetherand how a conception of arguments can be reconciled with the structural features of therelations. Chapter Five reports the experiment designed to explore how the tendency to repeatstructure across successive sentences might be modified by semantic relationships betweenthe elements of those sentences. Proceeding on the assumption that animacy is animportant force in the assignment of arguments to syntactic relations, we examine theeffects of animacy matches and mismatches between the surface subjects of active andpassive priming sentences and active and passive target sentences. This experiment hasyielded surprisingly consistent support for a conception of basic syntactic relations thatpermits a direct mapping to surface positions. We then survey how this conception fitswith other evidence about conceptual and structural forces in sentence formulation. Weend up with an endorsement of a view of language production that incorporates a set ofmapping operations that are sensitive to animacy (along with other semantic features) anda set of structural operations that are not. Chapter Six summarizes and argues for a lexicalist, or direct-mapping, view of therelationship between syntactic functions and surface syntactic relations and for a linkbetween semantic features and the assignment of arguments to syntactic functions. There are several limitations to this work that deserve noting. The current research isonly tentative. It is hoped that this psycholinguistic research will attract more linguists andlanguage learners' interest and lead to further studies in second and foreign languageacquisition.