An Eye Movement Study On The Ambiguity Interpretation And Resolution In DE-sentences

Ambiguity frequently occurs in sentence comprehension.As a result,disambiguation is of vital importance in sentence interpretation.Targeting on a specific Chinese sentence construction-causative DE-sentences(???“?”??),whose basic structure is NP1 + V+ DE(?)+NP2 + VP/AP,the author attempts to study the process of ambiguity recognition and elimination and provide new evidence for the interaction between syntax,semantics,and context.Currently,most of the research on De-sentence focuses on the theoretical exploration of the reason that leads to the vagueness in the meaning of the sentence.Little attention is paid to the recognition and resolution of ambiguity and few studies investigating the ambiguity in Chinese are concerned with DE-sentences.In addition,the central debate of interaction between syntax and non-syntactic sources,whether the meaning of a sentence is mostly determined by syntax or by the combined effect of various constraints,is not yet reaching a conclusion.Therefore,studies on the ambiguity of DE-sentence is still lacking.To grasp the cognition and disambiguation process of DE-sentence and investigate the interaction between syntactic and non-syntactic constraints,an eye-tracking approach is applied in the thesis.A two-part experiment is designed by the Experiment Builder and conducted with subjects of university and post-graduate students who are all native speakers of Mandarin Chinese.Some ambiguous DE-sentences are presented in the first part and disambiguated sentences in the second.The research questions of this thesis include:(1)When reading a DE-sentence,how is the cognition of different interpretations reflected by eye movements and what is the distribution of each interpretation type?(2)can multiple interpretations be eliminated with the help of context or lexical coercion and how efficient are these strategies?(3)In this construction,how is a reader influenced by syntactic or non-syntactic sources when he or she determines the sentence meaning?Behaviour and oculomotor data are collected with Data Viewer and processed in SPSS and Excel.The results are then combined with descriptive analysis.Conclusions are presented as follows:First of all,subjects demonstrate a similar oculomotor pattern and preference for the interpretation NP1+V,NP2+VP/AP in DE-sentence while the preference is largely influenced by the verb of the predicate in the sente,nce.Secondly,both context information and lexical information can eliminate ambiguity,yet the former shows a slight superiority yet with no insignificance in the effectiveness.However,both strategies cannot perform absolute disambiguation as a result of other constraints in the comprehension of DE-sentences,such as the locality.Last but not least,results also indicate a weak interaction model of sentence comprehension in which syntax demonstrates a relatively stronger influence in determining the meaning of a DE-sentence.Meanwhile,multiple syntactic alternatives are selected referring to other factors such as lexical and contextual information as well as the plausibility of the sentence.Overall,most of the results are consistent with previous theoretical studies of DE-sentences with the exception of the elimination of ambiguity.Results indicate that although the reason for disambiguation belongs to the same domain of animacy,in fact,it is the thematic relationship between nouns and verb/verb phrase that caused the disambiguation in DE-sentences rather than the animacy proposed by Sun(2010).Through the eye-tracking experiment,this thesis subjoins the theoretical cognitive research of DE-sentences with psycholinguistic research method and contributes to the research of sentence comprehension and semantics via describing the cognition process of DE-sentences.Besides,it provides supporting evidence for the weak interaction between syntax,semantics,and context,thus promoting the understanding and application of sentence parsing theories.