Abstract structures and meaning in Japanese dative structural priming

Syntactic structures and meaning appear to independently contribute to structural priming within English structural alternations. Japanese uses scrambling of case-marked phrases to create syntactic alternations, and it is not clear how meaning impacts scrambling-based structural choices. To examine...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied psycholinguistics 2022-03, Vol.43 (2), p.411-433
Main Authors: Chang, Franklin, Tsumura, Saki, Minemi, Itsuki, Hirose, Yuki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Figurative Language
Grammatical case
Japanese language
Language
Language Patterns
Meaning
Musicians
Nouns
Original Article
Priming
Sentences
Surface Structure
Syntactic structures
Syntax
Thematic roles
Verbs
Word order
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Summary:Syntactic structures and meaning appear to independently contribute to structural priming within English structural alternations. Japanese uses scrambling of case-marked phrases to create syntactic alternations, and it is not clear how meaning impacts scrambling-based structural choices. To examine this issue, meaning overlap with dative targets was manipulated in two structural priming experiments. In Experiment 1, datives primed dative targets, but structurally similar primes with idiomatic meanings did not prime. In Experiment 2, transitive primes that differed from datives in thematic roles showed as much priming as dative primes. The transitive results demonstrate that scrambling-based alternations in Japanese can be primed from structures that differ in role meaning, but the lack of idiom priming means that these structures may be less independent of meaning than those in other languages.
ISSN:0142-7164
1469-1817
DOI:10.1017/S0142716421000576