Prepositional Object Research Articles

Proficiency modulates between- but not within-language structural priming

The oldest of the Celtic language family, Irish differs considerably from English, notably with respect to word order and case marking. In spite of differences in surface constituent structure, less restricted accounts of bilingual shared syntax predict that processing datives and passives in Irish should prime the production of their English equivalents. Furthermore, this cross-linguistic influence should be sensitive to L2 proficiency, if shared structural representations are assumed to develop over time. In Experiment 1, we investigated cross-linguistic structural priming from Irish to English in 47 bilingual adolescents who are educated through Irish. Testing took place in a classroom setting, using written primes and written sentence generation. We found that priming for prepositional-object (PO) datives was predicted by self-rated Irish (L2) proficiency, in line with previous studies. In Experiment 2, we presented translations of the materials to an English-educated control group (n = 54). We found a within-language priming effect for PO datives, which was not modulated by English (L1) proficiency. Our findings are compatible with current theories of bilingual language processing and L2 syntactic acquisition.

Structural alignment and its prosocial effects in first and second languages

The present study examined structural alignment (prepositional object dative and double object dative) and its prosocial effects in Spanish-English bilinguals (English L2) and native English speakers (English L1). A scripted picture description paradigm in which a confederate and participant alternately described pictures was used. L1 and L2 speakers of English displayed comparable levels of structural alignment. In a second phase of the experiment we show that after being exposed to structural alignment by the confederate, L1 but not L2 participants displayed an increase in prosocial behavior as reflected by the time they were willing to help with an extra task. Possible explanations and implications are then discussed.

An investigation into the lexical boost with nonhead nouns

Abstract In five structural priming experiments, we investigated lexical boost effects in the production of ditransitive sentences. Although the residual activation model of Pickering and Branigan (1998) suggests that a lexical boost should only occur with the repetition of a syntactic licensing head in ditransitive prepositional object (PO)/double object (DO) structures, Scheepers, Raffray, and Myachykov (2017) recently found that it also occurs with the repetition of nouns that are not syntactic heads. We manipulated the repetition of the subject (Experiments 1–3), and the verb phrase (VP) internal arguments (i.e., either theme or recipient, Experiments 4–5) in PO/DO structures. In Experiment 2, the verb was also repeated between prime and target, while in the other experiments it was not. Three different tasks for eliciting the target were employed: picture description via the oral completion of a sentence fragment (Experiments 1–2, and 4), oral completion of a sentence fragment with no visual context (Experiment 3), and oral production of a sentence from a given array of words and no visual context (Experiment 5). Priming occurred in all experiments and was stronger when the verb was repeated (Experiment 2) than when it was not (Experiment 1). However, none of the experiments showed evidence that priming was stronger when either the subject or one of the VP-internal arguments was repeated. These findings support the view that structural information is associated with syntactic heads (i.e., the verb), but not with nonheads such as the subject noun and the VP-internal arguments (Pickering & Branigan, 1998).

AN ERROR ANALYSIS ON ENGLISH GERUNDS MADE BY THE SIXTH SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM OF UNIB IN THE ACADEMIC YEAR OF 2017/2018

The objectives of this research are to find out the types of errors and the most dominant error of using gerunds (as a subject of a sentence, as an object of preposition or after pr eposition, as a direct object of certain verbs, after a special expression and as a passive form) by the sixth semesterstudents of English Education Study Program of UNIB in the academic year of 2017/2018. The sample of this research consisted of 77 students. This research used descriptive quantitative method. The result of the analysis shows that the students made errors in all five types of gerunds. There were 27.1% (809) errors of using gerund as direct object of certain verbs, 24.5% (735) errors of using gerund as passive form, 20.8% (624) errors of using gerund after special expression, 15.5% (463) errors of using gerund as object of preposition or after preposition, 12.1% (361) errors of using gerund as subject of a sentence. Evidently, the most dominant errors made by the students of using gerund were the gerunds as direct object of certain verbs.

Sentence processing is modulated by the current linguistic environment and a priori information: An fMRI study.

IntroductionWords are not processed in isolation but in rich contexts that are used to modulate and facilitate language comprehension. Here, we investigate distinct neural networks underlying two types of contexts, the current linguistic environment and verb‐based syntactic preferences.MethodsWe had two main manipulations. The first was the current linguistic environment, where the relative frequencies of two syntactic structures (prepositional object [PO] and double‐object [DO]) would either follow everyday linguistic experience or not. The second concerned the preference toward one or the other structure depending on the verb; learned in everyday language use and stored in memory. German participants were reading PO and DO sentences in German while brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging.ResultsFirst, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) showed a pattern of activation that integrated the current linguistic environment with everyday linguistic experience. When the input did not match everyday experience, the unexpected frequent structure showed higher activation in the ACC than the other conditions and more connectivity from the ACC to posterior parts of the language network. Second, verb‐based surprisal of seeing a structure given a verb (PO verb preference but DO structure presentation) resulted, within the language network (left inferior frontal and left middle/superior temporal gyrus) and the precuneus, in increased activation compared to a predictable verb‐structure pairing.ConclusionIn conclusion, (1) beyond the canonical language network, brain areas engaged in prediction and error signaling, such as the ACC, might use the statistics of syntactic structures to modulate language processing, (2) the language network is directly engaged in processing verb preferences. These two networks show distinct influences on sentence processing.

Waarom zou een zin geen twee voorzetselvoorwerpen kunnen bevatten?

Abstract In the last two decades there has been a debate about the question whether a simple clause can contain more than one prepositional object. In this paper, I argue that the underlying grammatical model plays a decisive role in opting for either one or two prepositional objects, as becomes clear in the discussion between Vandeweghe and Broekhuis. Moreover, following Vandeweghe, I claim that simple clauses indeed can contain two prepositional objects if the relationship of each of the two objects to the predicate is different.

Waarom (ik denk dat) een deelzin slechts één voorzetselvoorwerp kan bevatten

Abstract Schermer-Vermeer (this volume) claims that grammatical models have played a decisive role in answering the question as to whether a simple clause may contain more than one prepositional object. Although I believe that theoretical considerations can be very useful in deciding among competing hypotheses, this reply article shows that Schermer-Vermeer is wrong in arguing that my earlier conclusion that there can be at most one PP-object in a clause is forced upon me by two hypotheses found in (certain versions of) the generative framework, namely (i) the unaccusativity hypothesis and (ii) the hypothesis that verbs can take at most two internal arguments.

Psychological verbs as a vulnerable syntactic domain: A comparative study of Latin and Italian

So-called psychological verbs such as Italian temere ‘fear’, preoccupare ‘worry’, and piacere ‘like’ denote a particular state that involves an Experiencer and a second role taker that causes, initiates or is related to the psychological state. They present an extremely varied argument structure across languages that arranges these two roles in apparently inverted hierarchies and assigns them different grammatical functions (subject, direct, indirect and prepositional objects). This paper aims to provide a descriptively adequate taxonomy of psych-verbs in Latin in a comparative perspective with Italian. We individuate seven classes of psych-verbs and show that they distribute across the transitive, unergative, unaccusative pattern with the possibility of externalising either argument, therefore creating three “direct” and three “inverted” classes. The seventh class is impersonal, with no external argument. We show that the diachronic variation and apparent idiosyncrasies displayed by some verbs can be explained by the proposal that the seven classes are potentially available to all psych-roots. For this reason, psych-verbs present a high degree of vulnerability in language contact and change which results in intra-language optionality and diachronic variation.

Grammatical choices of ditransitive patterns in academic articles

Abstract Texts are products of systemic functional choices determined by contextual factors . To analyze how the context affects writers’ lexico-grammatical choices, this paper attempts to study ditransitive patterns in the research article genre across medical science and sociology, a choice explained by the gap in the literature of genre analysis of ditransitivity. To this end, ditransitive patterns are quantified in a corpus of 245 academic articles from medical science and sociology published in 2011. The analysis shows that the object–prepositional object pattern dominates both disciplines, which can be explained by its being a compactness device enabling writers to observe the communicative functions of the research article genre. Across the two disciplines, the higher frequency of clausal patterns in sociology than medical science reveals the explicitness and persuasiveness of writers in sociology, which may be attributed to the different research methods, and the nature of knowledge accumulation in each discipline. These findings lead to the conclusion that the choices of ditransitive patterns are determined by the generic features of the research article genre and disciplinary specificities, though they are also influenced by the different research topics across disciplines and the category-selectional properties of ditransitives.

Semantic constraint on preposition incorporation of postverbal locative PPs in Mandarin Chinese

AbstractOther than subcategorized argument locative PPs (e.g. 放在桌子上fàng zài zhuōzi-shàng‘put on the table’), the postverbal position in Modern Mandarin Chinese can only be filled by limited types of adjunct locative prepositional phrases (e.g. 跳在桌子上tiào zài zhuōzi-shàng‘jump onto the table’). Among these postverbal adjunct locative PPs, only a small set of PPs permits the incorporation of the preposition into the preceding verb to form a V-P compound (“preposition incorporation”), yielding their previous prepositional object to surface as the object of the compound verb V-P. Previous studies claim that adjunct phrases which quantize an event, such as event delimiters, may behave like arguments (“the delimiter hypothesis”). Yet, our observations find that adjunct locative PPs that are not event delimiters (e.g. directional 向xiàng/往wǎng‘toward’ PPs or non-directional 在zài‘at’ PPs) can also allow their prepositional object to appear as the verbal object. This thus calls for a modification of the widely-accepted delimiter hypothesis. We argue that the semantic characterization of the postverbal locative PPs permitting PI can be generalized as being associated with the denotation of a scalar result. Specifically, we understandresultfrom the perspective ofscale structureproposed in recent studies and argue that in addition to delimiting an event (that is, introducing a closed scale to the event from the scalar perspective), such PPs can also either add directional information (an open scale) to the event that they modify, or further specify scalar information for the event denoted by the VP. This work not only provides a unified analysis of most types of preposition incorporation that involve the postverbal locative PPs in Mandarin Chinese, but is also the first study that provides a comprehensive analysis of the scalar properties and functions of Chinese locative PPs. Our findings from the Chinese data will also contribute to the cross-linguistic semantic generalization of internal adjuncts and the domain of extended direct case assignment.

‘Give it him and then I’ll give you money for it’. The dative alternation in Contemporary British English

‘Dative alternation’ refers to a linguistic phenomenon related to ditransitive verbs, that is, verbs which take a subject and two objects referring to a theme and a recipient. In English, the phenomenon offers the possibility of alternation between a prepositional object construction (PREP), where the recipient is encoded as a prepositional phrase (give it to him), a double object construction (DOC), where the recipient precedes the theme (give him it) and an alternative double object construction (altDOC), where the theme takes precedence over the recipient (give it him), the latter constrained to dialectal usage. Even though this alternation has been extensively addressed in the literature, few studies have considered language-external factors in determining the choice of encoding. This paper analyses the distribution of ditransitive forms in competition in contemporary British English from a twofold perspective, shedding some light on the distribution of these variants across time, along with the study of PREP, DOC and altDOC in relation to their sociolinguistic dimension. The corpus used as source of evidence is the British National Corpus, a 100-million-word collection of both written and spoken language from a wide range of sources.

Is it Truly Easy for Second Language Learners to Compose -ing Form Construction?

English rules are occasionally restricted, for instance, -ing form. This form is acquired in the early stage of natural acceptance and whether the earliest will guarantee ESL students to understand and compose it easily. This research is designated to investigate errors, sources of errors, and error tendencies made by students in composing –ing form. This research was carried out at UAD University in the English Department. Writing essay test was utilized to diagnose the tendency of –ing form misconception. Erroneous data were identified and categorized based on surface structure taxonomies and communication effect taxonomies. The findings prove that –ing form construction is not that easy for students to compose. Misformation frequenly appears due to some inappropriate formulation, mainly when students are asked to compose the –ing form as the constituent of phrase or clause, the direct object of certain verbs, and object of preposition with a particle of preposition to. The main factor affecting the deviation is caused by the distinct linguistic system of both English and Indonesian. The lack of knowledge towards the target language or incomplete instruction additionally makes students over-generalize every aspect of English rule which is occasionally restricted.

Analysis of The English Gerund as Subject, Direct Object, Subject Complemet, and Object of Preposition

The problem in this journal is gerund, verbal ending -ing and serves as a noun. Gerund differs from grammar construction in English because it is able to convert a verb into a noun by adding -ing at the end of the verb. At the same time, there is also a continuous tense form that adds -ing at the end of the verb. For students who start learning English will be confused with the form -ing that can be a noun and also a verb in the same sentence. The method used is the method of distribution, the method of data analysis into object analysis is part of the language itself. Objects in the distribution method are always part or element of the language being observed. In analyzing the data, the authors use qualitative methods. Qualitative research is a type of social science research that collects and works with non-numerical data and which seeks to interpret the meaning of the data being analyzed. In this study, researchers used descriptive design with the aim to analyze gerund as subject, direct object, complement of subject, and object of preposition at Tempo magazine in 2015. The author finds gerund formulation as follows: Gerund as Subject (Main + Main Verb + Complement), gerund as Direct Object (Subject + Main Verb + Gerund), gerund as Subject Complement (Subject + to be + Gerund), and gerund as Object of Preposition (Subject + Primary Keyword + Preposition + Gerund). The study found that Tempo magazine used gerund in magazines with higher gerund percentages as the preposition object. There are 8 gerunds as the subject, 5 gerund as a direct object, 6 gerund as complementary subject, and 23 gerund as the preposition object.

An Analysis of The English Gerund as Subject, Direct Object, Subject Complemet, and Object of Preposition

An Analysis of The English Gerund as Subject, Direct Object, Subject Complemet, and Object of Preposition

Syntactic chameleons: Are there individual differences in syntactic mimicry and its possible prosocial effects?

This study investigated whether syntactic mimicry leads to prosocial effects and whether any such effects are modulated by personality traits. Participants and a confederate of the experimenters took turns describing simple scenes. Target scenes could be described using either a prepositional object or a double object dative structure and we tested whether the participants mimicked the structure used by the confederate (Experiments 1A and 2A), whether mimicry of the participant's sentence structure (Experiments 1B and 2B) made the participant act in a more prosocial manner, and whether any such effects vary with Big Five traits. Participants displayed significant syntactic mimicry, which was additionally negatively related to levels of Extraversion. Syntactic mimicry did not lead to more prosocial behavior, as gauged by the time spent on an extra task (Experiment 1B). This conclusion was confirmed in Experiment 2B, which used a slight adaptation of the task that prevented a ceiling effect. However, a positive relation between prosocial behavior and levels of Conscientiousness was observed in the mimicry condition, which appeared to invert in the non-mimicry condition. We discuss several potential reasons for the absence of prosocial effects of syntactic mimicry and provide suggestions for future research.

Comparing explanations for the Complexity Principle: evidence from argument realization

abstractThe likelihood with which language users insert optional words or morphemes that explicitly mark syntactic structure tends to increase in complex grammatical environments. This positive correlation between explicitness and complexity, best known as the Complexity Principle, has been observed for a multitude of case studies in both naturally occurring language and experimental settings. Researchers have sought the explanation for this Complexity Principle in three different domains: cognitive comprehension processing, the language channel, and cognitive production processing. Based on these accounts, we formulate predictions regarding the action radius of the Complexity Principle in the alternation between a direct and prepositional object of the Dutch verbzoeken‘search’. These predictions are tested against corpus observations. Our results confirm accounts according to which optional elements indicate production difficulties, as well as those that explain the Principle as a result of restrictions on the language channel. In addition, our results indicate that the Principle is sensitive to context-determined restrictions that are the result of its underlying cause. This may present a possible caveat for alternation studies.

On the Role of Input in Second Language Acquisition: The Case of French Strong Pronouns

AbstractThis study examined the acquisition of a linguistic property that is underrepresented in the input available to second language (L2) learners, namely, interpretation of French strong pronouns as [–animate]. To understand how pronouns are used and interpreted and how this topic is treated in pedagogical grammars, three types of analyses were conducted: corpus analysis, review of pedagogical materials, and experimental study with native and L2 speakers of French. Corpus data suggested that French strong pronouns were not inherently specified as [+animate] and that native speakers used these forms to refer to inanimate objects, at least when strong pronouns were used as objects of prepositions. Additionally, experimental data revealed that advanced L2 speakers also accepted inanimate interpretations. Taken together, the findings suggested that targetlike interpretation of pronouns can be acquired despite the scarcity of input, negative transfer from learners’ first language, and lack of explicit instruction of the target property.

An experimental investigation of the binding options of demonstrative pronouns in German

This paper discusses data from two self-paced reading experiments as well as an acceptability rating study that shed light on the binding behaviour of demonstrative pronouns as opposed to personal pronouns. Participants read (Experiments 1 & 2) or rated (Experiment 3) single sentences that contained either a demonstrative pronoun (DPro) or a personal pronoun (PPro). Sentences contained a determiner phrase (DP) that functioned as the grammatical subject and a DP that functioned as the direct, indirect or prepositional object. The pronoun was either contained in the direct object DP or a prepositional object DP. In half of the sentences, pronouns could only be interpreted as bound by the subject DP. In the other half of sentences, they could only be interpreted as bound by the object DP. Results from Experiment 1 reveal similar reading times for DPros and PPros when they were bound by the object DP, and significantly longer reading times for DPros than PPros when they were bound by the subject DP. Experiment 2 replicated the DPro effect from Experiment 1 with materials where potential subject and object binders were quantifiers. Finally, Experiment 3 shows that also in the context of quantifier binding DPros are not generally dispreferred. Sentences with a DPro were only rated as less acceptable than sentences with a PPro when the potential binder was the subject. Taken together, our data provide evidence that DPros can be bound as long as their binders are not grammatical subjects.

Alternating constructions with ditransitivegebenin present-day German

AbstractThis paper reports on a corpus-based investigation of the verbgebenin two alternating ditransitive constructions in present-day German with theRecipienteither coded in the dative case (the indirect object construction, abbreviated: IOC) or by means of the PPan+ accusative case (the prepositional object construction, POC). The study is based on a quantitative analysis ofN=1,301 sentences (712 IOC and 589 POC) drawn from theDeutsche Referenzkorpus(IDS, Mannheim) which were annotated for 20 factors. Using a logistic regression analysis, we found evidence for the effect of 10 predictors (bootstrapped C-index=95%). We discuss our results in comparison to corpus-based research of the English dative alternation and point to some notable differences between both languages. In German, POC appears to be strongly correlated with collectiverecipients, collectiveagents, passive voice, and concrete and propositional transfer senses of the main verbgeben. With regard to the semantics ofgeben, we argue that the quantitative findings are best accounted for on the basis of a general underspecified verb meaning ‘gebentransfer’ that does not yet differentiate between the three possible verb senses (concrete, abstract, and propositional).

Directionality and complexity of L1 transfer in L2 acquisition: Evidence from L2 Chinese discourse

Abstract First language (L1) transfer is a common phenomenon in second language (L2) acquisition. However, it will be argued in this article that although there are indeed pervasive influences of learners’ L1 in L2 acquisition, L1 transfer is not everywhere and it can be directional. We compare data from Chang’s (2001b. Discourse effects on the second language acquisition of English and Chinese dative structures. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i at Manoa PhD dissertation, 2004. Discourse effects on EFL learners’ production of dative constructions. Journal of Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences 33. 145–169.) studies of Chinese-speaking learners of English with data of our study of English-speaking learners of Chinese to examine whether their L2 English discourse and L2 Chinese discourse are equally influenced by their L1 discourse rules. We focus on learners’ answers to wh-questions with a double object construction or a prepositional object construction. The results demonstrate that L1 transfer takes place in Chinese-speaking learners’ L2 English discourse but not in English-speaking learners’ L2 Chinese discourse. This directionality of L1 transfer is accounted for on the basis of computational complexity of linguistic structures involved and on an economical consideration.