Perera C K, Srivastava A K
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, 221005, U.P., India.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2016 Aug;45(4):915-30. doi: 10.1007/s10936-015-9384-0.
Two studies investigated interaction of animacy-based accessibility and competition processes with language specific constraints in shaping production preferences. Relative clause elicitation tasks (Gennari et al. in Cogn Psychol 65:141-176, 2012) were performed by two groups with 40 participants in each. Significantly more passives were produced with animate question/focus and assigned subject function to them in Malayalam, while the difference was insignificant in Hindi with animacy not equating with grammatical function assignment. Both languages produced active objects with OSV order significantly more with animate question/focus. This indicates animacy effect on word order. Animacy also influenced the expression of the agent phase in both languages as a tendency was found to omit the agent by-phase or to delay its appearance, when the two animate nouns entering into the structure are highly similar. The results point to language specific constraints in relative clause production and variability in the role of animacy-based retrieval order across languages.
两项研究调查了基于生命性的可及性和竞争过程与语言特定限制在塑造产出偏好方面的相互作用。两组各有40名参与者进行了关系从句引出任务（Gennari等人，《认知心理学》65:141 - 176，2012）。在马拉雅拉姆语中，当有生命的疑问/焦点时，产生的被动语态显著更多，并将主语功能赋予它们，而在印地语中，这种差异不显著，生命性与语法功能分配不相等。两种语言在有生命的疑问/焦点时，以OSV顺序产生主动宾语的情况都显著更多。这表明生命性对词序有影响。生命性也影响了两种语言中施事阶段的表达，因为当进入结构的两个有生命名词高度相似时，发现有一种倾向是省略施事阶段或延迟其出现。结果表明关系从句产出中存在语言特定限制，以及基于生命性的检索顺序在不同语言中的作用存在变异性。
