Syntactic priming of relative clause attachments: persistence of structural configuration in sentence production

Cognition ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Scheepers
2020 ◽  
pp. 114-132
Author(s):  
Nicola Munaro ◽  
Cecilia Poletto

This chapter investigates a phenomenon attested in some Southern Italian varieties, where a form identical to the wh-item meaning “where” can be used as a locative preposition. Since most of the dialects considered here only use P-where in cases of quasi-inalienable locative possession, this chapter adopts the recent proposal that the structural configuration of inalienable possession is to be interpreted as a RelatorP whose predicative head functions as the relator between the possessor, located in the specifier position, and the possessee, that is, the locative noun, sitting in the complement position. It also proposes that P-where exploits a sort of reduced relative in which the null classifier-like element PLACE located in the internal structure of the wh-item undergoes raising to the highest functional specifier; the reduced relative clause is taken to occupy the specifier of a bigger small clause, whose complement is represented by the RelatorP containing the actual lexical nouns.


2013 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrien Segaert ◽  
Gerard Kempen ◽  
Karl Magnus Petersson ◽  
Peter Hagoort

2002 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 879-896 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Desmet ◽  
Marc Brysbaert ◽  
Constantijn De Baecke

We examined the production of relative clauses in sentences with a complex noun phrase containing two possible attachment sites for the relative clause (e.g., “Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony.”). On the basis of two corpus analyses and two sentence continuation tasks, we conclude that much research about this specific syntactic ambiguity has used complex noun phrases that are quite uncommon. These noun phrases involve the relationship between two humans and, at least in Dutch, induce a different attachment preference from noun phrases referring to non-human entities. We provide evidence that the use of this type of complex noun phrase may have distorted the conclusions about the processes underlying relative clause attachment. In addition, it is shown that, notwithstanding some notable differences between sentence production in the continuation task and in coherent text writing, there seems to be a remarkable correspondence between the attachment patterns obtained with both modes of production.


2000 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANN SUTTON ◽  
TANYA GALLAGHER ◽  
JILL MORFORD ◽  
NAVID SHAHNAZ

Complex syntactic structures may be difficult to recognize when produced using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems that do not contain grammatical markers. The present study investigated adult English speakers' production of Subject and Object relative clause sentences using a picture/symbol-based AAC system with speech output. Most participants avoided the potential ambiguity that resulted from the absence of grammatical markers. They followed spoken English word order when encoding Object relative clause sentences, but altered this order for Subject relative clause sentences. Most participants used constituent proximity to maintain the distinction between Subject and Object relative clause sentences. Results indicate the combined effects of underlying syntactic knowledge and pragmatic variables on the AAC constituent order patterns observed.


Cognition ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Smith ◽  
Linda Wheeldon

2014 ◽  
Vol 04 (05) ◽  
pp. 641-650
Author(s):  
Hao Feng ◽  
Luyao Chen ◽  
Lijuan Feng ◽  
Liping Feng

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica L. Montag ◽  
Kazunaga Matsuki ◽  
Jae Yun Kim ◽  
Maryellen C. MacDonald

Cross-linguistic studies allow for analyses that would be impossible in a single language. To better understand the factors that underlie sentence production, we investigated production choices in main and relative clause production tasks in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean. The effects of both non-linguistic attributes (such as conceptual animacy) and language specific properties (such as word order) were investigated. Japanese and Korean are structurally similar to each other but different from English, which allowed for an investigation of the production consequences of non-linguistic attributes in different typological or word order contexts (when Japanese and Korean speakers make similar production choices that are unlike those of English speakers), as well as production choices that differ despite typological similarity (when Japanese and Korean speakers make different choices). Speakers of all three languages produced more passive utterances when describing animate entities, but the overall rate of passives varied by task and language. Further, the sets of items that were most likely to elicit passives varied by language, with Japanese and Korean speakers more likely to produce passives when patients were adversely affected by the depicted event. These results suggest a number of factors that contribute to language production choices across three languages, and how general cognitive constraints on sentence production may interact with the structure of a specific language.


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