Referent Predictability is Affected by Syntactic Structure: Evidence from Chinese

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• 作者：Wei Cheng ; Amit Almor
• 关键词：Implicit causality ; Implicit consequentiality ; Predictability ; Chinese ba
• 刊名：Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：46
• 期：1
• 页码：157-174
• 全文大小：
• 刊物主题：Psychology, general; Cognitive Psychology; Psycholinguistics;
• 出版者：Springer US
• ISSN：1573-6555
• 卷排序：46

文摘

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.