The utilization of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues in the assignment of subject role in Arabic

Abstract

AbstractThe role of four cues in the assignment of actor role in Arabic was studied. These cues included animacy, case marking, gender agreement, and word order. The cues were set-in-a competing/converging fashion following the framework of the Competition Model of Bates and MacWhinney (1981, 1982, 1987). Fifty-four sentences representing all possible permutations of the cues were presented to 100 native speakers of Arabic, who were asked to identify the actor in each sentence. Subjects relied mainly on gender agreement and case marking in the assignment of the actor role. The results suggested that cue validity is very highly correlated with cue strength. It was also found that cues do not exhibit an additive nature, and that cross-linguistic formal similarities do not warrant similar processing strategies. Order of nouns tended to represent a “latent strategy” to be utilized only when other relevant cues were not available.