Animacy effects in German sentence production 13:30 – 14:00: Sabine Reuters, Universität zu Köln, [email protected], Dr. Sarah Verlage, Universität zu Köln, [email protected] & Prof. Dr. Martina Penke, Universität zu Köln, [email protected] Linguistic communication often takes place in contexts in which speakers talk about events and entities they currently observe in the extralinguistic visual world. In order to faciliate communication and convey an utterance appropriately, speakers have to choose between diverse syntactic alternatives (Myachykov 2010: 53). The picture depicted below, for instance, can be described by formulating a German active like Der Teufel trägt den Sack (The devil is carrying the sack), but one can also choose a passive sentence such as Der Sack wird von dem Teufel getragen (The sack is being carried by the devil) or a topicalization like Den Sack trägt der Teufel (The sack [ACC] is carrying the devil [NOM]) to describe the scenario adequately. In recent decades, numerous linguistic research paradigms have proven that this arrangement of words in sentence production is by no means arbitrary, but reflects the interaction of language and cognition in form of a linguistic message (Bock 1982; Jackendoff 2002). More concretely, diverse crosslinguistic studies have shown that concepts which are placed higher on the animacy hierarchy scale are chosen as sentential subject or in an earlier clause position (Bock & Warren 1985; Bock et al. 1992; Prat Sala 1997; Van Nice & Dietrich 2003). We are going to present a study which was designed to find out how animacy determines the selection of a specific syntactic structure in – to this date under-researched – German sentence production. We were specifically interested in the impact of patient animacy on the choice of a particular syntactic structure. For this purpose, we conducted a sentence production experiment with monolingual, unimpaired German participants who were asked to describe simple black-and-white drawings depicting interactions between either i) an animate agent and an animate patient or ii) an animate agent and an inanimate patient and which were designed to elicit simple transitive sentences including an action verb in the form of an active or passive clause or a topicalization. We predicted that pictures with animate patients would lead to a significantly higher number of marked passive and topicalized structures as well as to longer reaction times between stimulus presentation and speech onset. The results of our study show that psycholinguistic experiments like ours can shed light on the nature of the relationship between conceptual factors and syntactic choices.
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