Nagata H, Bain B
Faculty of Economics, Okayama University, Tsushima, Japan.
Percept Mot Skills. 2000 Oct;91(2):503-11. doi: 10.2466/pms.2000.91.2.503.
This study explored native speakers' linguistic intuition as revealed in judging the grammaticality of sentences. Speakers of English (n = 36) and Japanese (n = 57) judged the relative grammaticality of sentences involving a verb which occurred together with one, two or three arguments. Findings showed that English speakers were more affected by the number of arguments in sentences. They judged sentences having three arguments as grammatical most often and ones having one or two arguments as grammatical less often. However, Japanese speakers gave rather similar and more grammatical judgments regardless of the number of arguments in sentences. The findings indicate a difference in tightness of argument structure in the two languages even when the sentences judged are simple sentences and they are given without any sentential context.
本研究探讨了以英语为母语者在判断句子语法正确性时所表现出的语言直觉。36名英语母语者和57名日语母语者对包含一个、两个或三个论元的动词的句子的相对语法正确性进行了判断。研究结果表明，英语母语者更容易受到句子中论元数量的影响。他们最常判断包含三个论元的句子为语法正确，而判断包含一个或两个论元的句子为语法正确的频率较低。然而，无论句子中的论元数量如何，日语母语者给出的判断都较为相似且更多地判定为语法正确。研究结果表明，即使所判断的句子是简单句且没有任何句子上下文，这两种语言在论元结构的紧密程度上也存在差异。
