Structural priming and the phrasal/clausal distinction: The case of concealed questions

Authors

  • Gözde Bahadır Cognitive Science, Middle East Technical University, Turkey Author
  • Maria Polinsky Linguistics, Harvard University, USA Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2011/04/0003/000172

Keywords:

structural priming, concealed questions, embedded clauses, interrogative, declarative

Abstract

This paper investigates whether structural priming is sensitive to the phrasal vs. clausal nature of the constructions it tests. To that end, we examine noun phrases (NPs) that receive a question-like interpretation when embedded under certain predicates. These NPs are known as "concealed question (CQ) NPs". We first report the results of a pilot study that establishes the co-occurrence patterns of the target embedding predicates. We then present two structural priming studies which test CQ NPs against overt embedded questions: "embedded wh-questions" and "embedded declaratives". Both written sentence completion tasks demonstrate structural priming, which turns out to be sensitive to the phrase–clause distinction.

 

References

Bahadır, G. and Polinsky, M. 2010. Structural priming of CQs. Poster presented at the 6th International Workshop on Language Production. Edinburgh, UK.

Bock, J. K. 1986. Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18(3), 355–387.

Caponigro, I. and Heller, D. 2007. The non-concealed nature of free relatives: Implications for connectivity in specificational sentences. In C. Barker and P. Jacobson (eds.), Direct Compositionality, 237–263. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heim, I. 1979. Concealed questions. In R. Bäuerle, U. Egli and A. von Stechow (eds.), Semantics from Different Points of View, 51–60. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Nathan, L. E. 2006. On the interpretation of concealed questions. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pickering, M. J. and Branigan, H. P. 1998. The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 39(4), 633–651.

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Published

01-01-2011

How to Cite

Structural priming and the phrasal/clausal distinction: The case of concealed questions. (2011). Linguistic Proceedings Series, 4(1), 15-18. https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2011/04/0003/000172

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