Cheng Wei, Almor Amit
Linguistics Program, 909 Welsh Humanities Building, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA.
Psychology Department, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2017 Feb;46(1):157-174. doi: 10.1007/s10936-016-9430-6.
This paper examines the effect of syntactic structures on referent predictability. Focusing on stimulus-experiencer (SE) verbs, we conducted two sentence-completion experiments in Chinese by contrasting SE verbs in three structures (active canonical, active ba, and passive). The results showed that although verb semantics and discourse coherence relations produce a strong referential biases, the stimulus referent is overall less likely to be rementioned in the active canonical structure than in the other two structures. The findings thus indicate that referent predictability is determined by not only semantic but also syntactic factors. We discuss the theoretical implications for the nature of referent predictability and its relationship with referent accessibility.
本文考察句法结构对所指可预测性的影响。聚焦于刺激-体验者（SE）动词，我们通过对比三种结构（主动规范结构、主动把字句和被动结构）中的SE动词，用中文进行了两项句子完成实验。结果表明，尽管动词语义和语篇连贯关系会产生强烈的指称偏向，但与其他两种结构相比，刺激所指在主动规范结构中总体上被再次提及的可能性较小。因此，研究结果表明，所指可预测性不仅由语义因素决定，还由句法因素决定。我们讨论了这些发现对所指可预测性本质及其与所指可及性的关系的理论意义。
