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How broad are thematic roles? Evidence from structural priming.
Jayden Ziegler1, Jesse Snedeker1
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
Cognition
|August 2, 2018
Summary
Linguistic studies show that speakers distinguish between recipient and destination roles, even though they can be primed independently of syntax. This suggests these thematic roles are distinct, not interchangeable.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Verbs with similar meanings often share syntactic structures.
- Thematic roles, such as agent, recipient, and theme, generalize semantic roles in sentences.
- A key question is whether thematic roles are broad or distinct.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether speakers treat recipient and destination thematic roles as interchangeable or distinct.
- To determine if priming occurs between dative and locative sentences, testing the broad role of 'goal'.
Main Methods:
- Conducted eleven structural priming experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk with 2914 participants.
- Examined priming effects between dative sentences (with recipients) and locative sentences (with destinations).
Main Results:
- Thematic role mappings can be primed independently of syntactic structure, lexical content, and animacy.
- Priming did not extend from destination roles to recipient roles, or vice versa.
Conclusions:
- Recipient and destination thematic roles are distinct, not interchangeable.
- This finding provides evidence against a single, broad 'goal' thematic role encompassing both.
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