Argument Ambiguities Make Subject Relative Clause More Difficult to Process than Object Relative Clause in Mandarin

• 作者: HE Wen-guang YANG Xie-lan
• 来源期刊: 文学与艺术研究:英文版
• 学科: 工学
• 关键词: subjective RELATIVE CLAUSE OBJECT RELATIVE CLAUSE ARGUMENT ambiguity MANDARIN
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（2）
• 页码范围: 102-113
• 页数: 12页
• 分类号: TN9

摘要

Relative clauses(RCs)processing has been a hot issue in decades.Studies from head-initial languages have found that SRCs were easier to comprehend than ORCs,and many different models were constructed to account for SRCs preference.Chinese are head-final languages and the head noun phrases are behind the internal-clause.Such a great difference in syntactic structure made Chinese to be the optimum material to test the models mentioned above.In the paper,two experiments were carried out using eye-movement tracking methods to explore the difficulty with RCs processing in mandarin,and results showed that:when the two noun phrases were both from animate category,SRCs were more difficult than ORCs,but when the noun phrases in the internal-relative-clause were inanimate and the noun phrases in the matrix were animate,the difficulties with SRCs were greatly reduced.Based on these findings,we hold that the linear syntactic distance between the gap and the filler was not the key reason to the difficulty with SRCs.On the contrary,the ambiguity in argument construction may be the most important.