Word Category Conversion Revisited: The Case of Adjectives and Participles in L1 and L2 German.

Andreas Opitz,Denisa Bordag

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01045

Andreas Opitz, Denisa Bordag

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01045

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Abstract

One of the hypotheses about mental representation of conversion (i.e., zero-derivation) claims that converted forms are a product of a costly mental process that converts a word’s category into another one when needed, i.e., depending on the syntactic context in which the word appears. The empirical evidence for the claim is based primarily on self-paced reading experiments by Stolterfoht et al. (2010) in which they explored the assumed conversion of German verbs into adjectives in two syntactic contexts with past participles. In our priming study, we show that the effects that had been attributed to the conversion process are in fact frequency effects. In addition, based on our data we argue that past participles do not undergo any change in word class in either of the two syntactic contexts, which is consistent with, e.g., traditional German grammars. The same pattern of frequency effects was observed for German native speakers and advanced L2 German learners.

Highlights

Word class category information is crucial for constructing syntactic representations and language comprehension in general
We explored the representation and processing of German participles in predicate position, following either the verb sein or werden in L1 and L2 German
This research question was previously addressed by Stolterfoht et al (2010) who claimed that German participles were turned into adjectives by a conversion process in the sein-contexts

Summary

Introduction

Word class category information is crucial for constructing syntactic representations and language comprehension in general. The study basically delivers the only psycholinguistic evidence for the representation and processing of conversion forms ( called zero-derivation) by means of a productive process (cf Bauer and Valera, 2005, for other empirically based proposals of conversion representation). It is the only psycholinguistic study that addresses the putative word-class change of past participle forms in German.

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