| Chinese resultative constructions have been one of the research focus in the linguistic field due to its diversity in the semantic and the syntactical relations.Resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese always express a kind concept of action-result.Inverted resultative construction is a special type of Chinese resultative construction in which the agent of the causative verb is in the position of the object while the patient is in the position of the subject.The role reversed construction belongs to the category of role mismatch and refers to the phenomenon in which the agent of verb is in the position of the object while the patient is in the position of subject,such as inverted resultative construction.Having gone through all the ERP studies on the role-mismatch or role reversed constructions,we found that the P600 effect is sensitive to the role reversed sentences,and the typical one was the research done by Chow and Philip(2013).Besides,most of the existing studies focused on Indo-European languages,just few ERP studies of role mismatch took Mandarin Chinese as the research object.And most of the studies did not involve comparative analyses between the Mandarin Chinese and English.This thesis consists of two experiments,the material of Experiment One includes four conditions,Condition One(Ba constructions containing acceptable inverted resultative construction/role mismatch),Condition Two(Ba constructions containing unacceptable inverted resultative construction/role mismatch),Condition Three(Ba constructions containing implausible resultative construction)and Condition Four(Ba constructions containing acceptable resultative construction/Control).Experiment One aims to study the mechanism of the resultative construction using the ERP technology,and we will firstly check whether the existing models,such as Semantic Attraction Model,can give the explanations to the results,and then investigate the processing mechanism of the resultative constructions and find out the differences between the inverted resultative constructions(role-mismatch)and the role reversed sentences in English.According to the results in Experiment Two,we want to find whether the role reversed sentences in English can show the same result or not under the condition that we choose the Chinese college students as the subject with those of the experiment in previous studies.Experiment One results showed that we found a syntactic P600 in sentences under Condition one because of the surface implausibility and syntactic complexity,and the syntactic complexity of the resultatives leads to the syntactic reanalysis process.We found an N400 effect in sentences under Condition Two,but we propose that these sentences are likely to evoke the P600 effect,but the N400 effect is so large that it extends well into the P600 time-window in the sentences,and then the P600 effect is likely to be attenuated and does not show a transparent amplitude in the data statistics and EEG.And sentences under Condition Two evoke an N400 due to semantic anomaly.Sentences under Condition One and Condition Two have the similar construction with role-reversed sentences in English.Through the comparison,we find that role-reversed sentences in English and those under Condition One all evoke a P600.However,the P600 elicited by the sentences under Condition One is a syntactic P600,but the P600 elicited by the role-reversed sentences in English is a semantic P600.Condition Two just elicit the N400 effect.Therefore,they have different processing mechanisms.In Experiment Two,the experiment found a P600 in the role-reversed sentences when we chose the Chinese college students to take part in the experiment.The result is consistent with the previous studies,so there is no significant difference in processing of the English role-reversed sentences between the native Chinese people and the native English people. |
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