Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study.

Xin Wang,Yiming Yang,Renyu Wang,Shiwen Feng,Guowei Wu,Tongquan Zhou,Fengshan Ni

doi:10.3390/brainsci11080983

Abstract

According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, intransitive verbs are divided into unaccusative and unergative ones based on the distinction of their syntactic properties, which has been proved by previous theoretical and empirical evidence. However, debate has been raised regarding whether intransitive verbs in Mandarin Chinese can be split into unaccusative and unergative ones syntactically. To analyze this theoretical controversy, the present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural processing of deep unaccusative, unergative sentences, and passive sentences (derived structures undergoing a syntactic movement) in Mandarin Chinese. The results revealed no significant difference in the neural processing of deep unaccusative and unergative sentences, and the comparisons between passive sentences and the other sentence types revealed activation in the left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG) and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG). These findings indicate that the syntactic processing of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin Chinese is highly similar but different from that of passive verbs, which suggests that deep unaccusative and unergative sentences in Mandarin Chinese are both base-generated structures and that there is no syntactic distinction between unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin Chinese.

Highlights

Verbs are generally considered to be the core of a sentence as they determine the syntactic structure of the sentence where they appear
These results showed that for Mandarin Chinese, the neural processing of deep unaccusative sentences and unergative sentences was highly similar but different from that of the passive ones, which suggests that compared with the Mandarin passive sentences, the derived structures that underwent syntactic movement from the internal position to the external position, the Mandarin deep unaccusative sentences and unergative sentences were both base-generated structures, which further suggests that the arguments of Mandarin unaccusative and unergative verbs were both base-generated in the surface subject position
In contrast to previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (f MRI) studies, the f MRI results revealed that in Mandarin Chinese, deep unaccusative sentences did not require more involvement of brain regions than unergative sentences did for processing

Summary

Introduction

Verbs are generally considered to be the core of a sentence as they determine the syntactic structure of the sentence where they appear. One of the most influential theories associated with the subcategorization of verbs is the Unaccusative Hypothesis proposed by Perlmutter [5], which posits the view that intransitive verbs can be divided into unaccusative and unergative ones, concerning the distinct base-generated positions of their subjects. Deep unaccusative sentences and unergative sentences have the same word order, where the noun phrase is followed by the verb. As shown by (a) in Figure 1, gorillas, the surface subject of the unaccusative verb exist, is originally in the initial position (an object position) and moves to the initial position (a subject position). By comparison, (b) in Figure 2 shows that as the there is much theoretical and experimental evidence showing that unaccu-

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