From conceptual roles to structural relations: Bridging the syntactic cleft.

Abstract

The distinction between underlying and superficial linguistic structure is a staple of modern cognitive psychology. Despite increasingly diverse conceptions of syntactic relations in linguistic theory, the received view in psycholinguistics has remained one in which the entities assigned to underlying relations may assume different surface relations. The present article examines this view in the context of language production and reviews evidence that the disposition to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation is a basic feature of language use, suggesting that mappings from conceptual categories to syntactic relations form a main support of the bridge from conception to language. Proceeding on this assumption, the article also evaluates competing accounts of the mapping process in production. The results argue against syntactic relation-changing operations, but favor a division between meaning- and form-related mechanisms.

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   Chang, Franklin, Dell, Gary S., Bock, Kathryn · 2006 · Psychological Review
4. The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning?
   Bock, Kathryn, Griffin, Zenzi M. · 2000 · Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
5. Syntactic Priming: A Corpus-based Approach
   Gries, Stefan Th. · 2005 · Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

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