Abstract
AbstractSyntactic 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.
Highlights
Speakers use language to convey meaning to others
Evidence in support of the independence of structures and meaning comes from work on structural priming, which is a tendency for people to repeat previously heard syntactic structures (Bock, 1986)
Experiment 1: Idiom and dative priming in Japanese To examine how meaning influences structural priming in Japanese, we examined how the production of compositional dative targets was influenced by compositional and idiomatic prime sentences
Summary
Speakers use language to convey meaning to others. One representation that supports this ability is syntax, which allows novel meanings to be communicated through the ordering of words. Konopka and Bock (2009) examined structural priming with these idiomatic and non-idiomatic verb–particle combinations They used target structures where speakers had a choice to place the particle before the NP the high prices scared off the customer (VERB PARTICLE NP) or after the NP The high prices scared the customers off (VERB NP PARTICLE). The meaning of the idiomatic prime pull off a robbery implies that it should have a VERB NP structure and this structure should not prime VERB PARTICLE NP targets They found that both idiomatic and non-idiomatic primes increased production of the same structures on the target suggesting idioms make use of compositional structures that do not reflect their meaning. This study suggested that even though frozen and flexible idioms are not compositional and must be stored as wholes, there is a level of syntactic processing where they can prime compositional structures
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