TY - JOUR
T1 - How abstract is syntax? Evidence from structural priming
AU - Ziegler, Jayden
AU - Bencini, Giulia
AU - Goldberg, Adele
AU - Snedeker, Jesse
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science research grant to JZ. We thank Kay Bock for sharing her stimuli; Steven Pinker, the members of SnedLab, and audience at CUNY 2018 for helpful feedback and discussion; and Miriam Hauptman for assistance with coding.
Funding Information:
This research was supported by a Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science research grant to JZ. We thank Kay Bock for sharing her stimuli; Steven Pinker, the members of SnedLab, and audience at CUNY 2018 for helpful feedback and discussion; and Miriam Hauptman for assistance with coding.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2019/12
Y1 - 2019/12
N2 - In 1990, Bock and Loebell found that passives (e.g., The 747 was radioed by the airport's control tower) can be primed by intransitive locatives (e.g., The 747 was landing by the airport's control tower). This finding is often taken as strong evidence that structural priming occurs on the basis of a syntactic phrase structure that abstracts across lexical content, including prepositions, and is uninfluenced by the semantic roles of the arguments. However, all of the intransitive locative primes in Bock and Loebell contained the preposition by (by-locatives), just like the passive targets. Therefore, the locative-to-passive priming may have been due to the adjunct headed by by, rather than being a result of purely abstract syntax. The present experiment investigates this possibility. We find that passives and intransitive by-locatives are equivalent primes, but intransitive locatives with other prepositions (e.g., The 747 has landed near the airport control tower) do not prime passives. We conclude that a shared abstract, content-less tree structure is not sufficient for passive priming to occur. We then review the prior results that have been offered in favor of abstract tree priming, and note the range of evidence can be considerably narrowed—and possibly eliminated—once effects of animacy, semantic event structure, shared morphology, information structure, and rhythm are taken into account.
AB - In 1990, Bock and Loebell found that passives (e.g., The 747 was radioed by the airport's control tower) can be primed by intransitive locatives (e.g., The 747 was landing by the airport's control tower). This finding is often taken as strong evidence that structural priming occurs on the basis of a syntactic phrase structure that abstracts across lexical content, including prepositions, and is uninfluenced by the semantic roles of the arguments. However, all of the intransitive locative primes in Bock and Loebell contained the preposition by (by-locatives), just like the passive targets. Therefore, the locative-to-passive priming may have been due to the adjunct headed by by, rather than being a result of purely abstract syntax. The present experiment investigates this possibility. We find that passives and intransitive by-locatives are equivalent primes, but intransitive locatives with other prepositions (e.g., The 747 has landed near the airport control tower) do not prime passives. We conclude that a shared abstract, content-less tree structure is not sufficient for passive priming to occur. We then review the prior results that have been offered in favor of abstract tree priming, and note the range of evidence can be considerably narrowed—and possibly eliminated—once effects of animacy, semantic event structure, shared morphology, information structure, and rhythm are taken into account.
KW - Abstract syntax
KW - Passive alternation
KW - Structural priming
KW - Syntactic priming
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104045
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104045
M3 - Article
C2 - 31446328
AN - SCOPUS:85070863948
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 193
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
M1 - 104045
ER -