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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from a Self-paced Reading Study
1Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Q78, B7704, Blue Zone, Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, 83, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China. xuewentingxwt@outlook.com.
Abstract:
The study aims to explore the processing pattern of Mandarin Chinese sentences with complement coercion. Complement coercion is a known linguistic phenomenon in which some verbs, semantically requiring an event-denoting complement, are combined with an entity-denoting complement, as in Mary began the book. The combination (i.e., event-selecting verb + entity-denoting noun) has been reported to involve type mismatch, and thus elicits processing difficulty. While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in Indo-European languages, such as English and German, it is debatable if the phenomenon exists in a typologically distinct language from English (e.g., in structural complexity of words), such as Mandarin. To provide empirical evidence, the study conducted a self-paced reading experiment to compare the processing patterns of coercion sentences and non-coercion controls in Mandarin. The results showed longer reading times for the coercion sentences than the non-coercion counterparts, which supported previous findings about the processing difficulty of complement coercion.
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