How broad are thematic roles? Evidence from structural priming

Abstract

Verbs that are similar in meaning tend to occur in the same syntactic structures. For example, give and hand, which denote transfer of possession, both appear in the prepositional-object construction: "The child gave/handed the ball to the dog." We can call the child a "giver" in one case and a "hander" in the other, or we can refer to her more generally as the agent, or doer of the action. Similarly, the dog can be called the recipient, and the ball, the theme. These generalized notions of agent, recipient, and theme are known as thematic roles. An important theoretical question for linguists and psycholinguists is what the set of thematic roles is. Are there a small number of very broad roles, perhaps with each one mapping onto a single canonical syntactic position? Or are there many distinct roles, several mapping to the same syntactic position but conveying subtly different meanings? We investigate this question across eleven structural priming experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (total N = 2914), asking whether speakers treat the thematic roles recipient and destination (i.e., location or spatial goal) as interchangeable, suggesting the broad role of goal, or distinct, suggesting two separate roles. To do so, we look for priming between dative sentences (e.g., "The man gave the ball to the dog"), which have a recipient role (dog), and locative sentences (e.g., "The man loaded hay onto the wagon"), which instead have a destination role (wagon). Our pattern of findings confirms that thematic role mappings can be primed independent of syntactic structure, lexical content, and animacy. However, we find that this priming does not extend from destinations to recipients (or vice versa), providing evidence that these two roles are distinct.

Event Structures Drive Semantic Structural Priming, Not Thematic Roles: Evidence From Idioms and Light Verbs

“…Priming is clearly a powerful means for studying linguistic representation (e.g., Branigan & Pickering, ). As the field has grown, evidence has mounted that priming can occur at multiple levels (syntactic, semantic, lexical, conceptual, information structural; e.g., Bock & Loebell, ; Bock et al., ; Chang et al., ; Pickering & Branigan, ; Vernice et al., ; Ziegler & Snedeker, ; for reviews, see Branigan & Pickering, ; Pickering & Ferreira, ). Here, we have used structural priming to ask about the semantic representations involved in language production, favoring event structures to thematic roles.…”

“…The other commonly used alternative for investigating semantic structural priming is the dative alternation (e.g., Cai et al., ; Cho‐Reyes et al., ; Hare & Goldberg, ; Köhne et al., ; Pappert & Pechmann, ; Salamoura & Williams, ; Ziegler & Snedeker, ). Unfortunately, priming within datives is typically triply ambiguous.…”

“…). This allows us to control for a variety of factors that are known to contribute to priming, including surface syntactic structure (e.g., Bock & Loebell, ; Messenger, Branigan, McLean, & Sorace, ; Ziegler & Snedeker, ), content‐ and function‐word overlap (e.g., Ferreira, ; Pickering & Branigan, ; Scheepers, Raffray, & Myachykov, ; Ziegler, Goldberg, & Snedeker, ), animacy (e.g., Bock, Loebell, & Morey, ; Gámez & Vasilyeva, ; Ziegler & Snedeker, ), morphosyntactic marking (e.g., Köhne et al., ; Pappert & Pechmann, ; Yamashita & Chang, ), and information structure (e.g., Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, ; Vernice, Pickering, & Hartsuiker, ; see Section ). Thus, if priming is purely based on surface syntax (or any of these other factors), then idioms and light verbs should be just as good primes for compositional dative targets as are other compositional dative primes, and vice versa.…”

“…Loebell & Bock, ). However, this particular finding is ambiguous: Priming in this case could be due to thematic roles, but it could also be due to perseveration in the mappings of animacy onto syntactic positions (e.g., Bock et al., ; Gámez & Vasilyeva, ; Ziegler & Snedeker, ).…”

The Acquisition of the Tagalog Symmetrical Voice System: Evidence from Structural Priming

“…On the other hand, it can be argued, for instance, that speakers tend to produce more passives because the patient is primed to be in the subject or sentence-initial position, instead of being due to the priming of the passive structure per se (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008 for a discussion). More recent studies with adults provide support for the suggestion that non-syntactic features such as thematic roles can be primed (Cai et al, 2012;Chang et al, 2003;Köhne et al, 2014;Pappert & Pechmann, 2014;Salamoura & Williams, 2007;Vernice et al, 2012;Ziegler & Snedeker, 2018; see Ziegler et al, 2019 for a review).…”