In linguistic theory and psycholinguistic research, …adele/papers/Papers/Franklin... · Web viewCan thematic roles leave traces of their places? Franklin Chang, Kathryn Bock, and

Thematic Roles 1

Running head: THEMATIC ROLES LEAVE TRACES

Can thematic roles leave traces of their places?

Franklin Chang, Kathryn Bock, and Adele Goldberg

Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Abstract

An important question in the study of language is the nature of the information that

speakers use to create syntactic structures. Research using structural priming has

suggested that the construction of syntactic frames may be insensitive to variations in

thematic roles within messages (Bock & Loebell, 1990; Bock, Loebell, & Morey, 1992).

Because these studies involved structural alternations whose syntax covaries with the

order of thematic roles, it is difficult to assess any independent contribution that role

information makes to the positioning of phrases. In this study, we primed the order of the

roles without changing the syntactic structure, and found that the order of the roles was

influenced by the priming manipulation. This implies that thematic roles or the features

that differentiate them are active within the mapping between messages and sentence

structures.

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Can thematic roles leave traces of their places?

When we speak, we typically try to convey some notion or set of notions in a

sequence of words. Both of these tasks, conveying notions linguistically and developing

a sequence of words for doing so, have been argued to depend on their own specialized

representations (Garrett, 1988). The sequencing of words is constrained by syntactic

structure, which represents hierarchical and linear relationships among phrases. Such

structures can be seen as schemes for guiding the retrieval of words from memory (Bock,

1987).

On their own, structural constraints cannot insure that a sentence conveys the

intended meaning, and the violations of sentence meaning seen in word exchanges and

other speech errors indicate that in fact, structural integrity is not incompatible with

semantic perfidy. Rather, another set of processes must mediate between intended

messages and syntax. For example, the relationship between man and dog is different in

the sentences The man bit the dog and The dog bit the man. In the first sentence, the dog

did the biting and the man was bitten, while in the second sentence these roles are

reversed. Because the same sets of roles can occur in different structural and serial

positions (compare the active The man bit the dog with the passive The dog was bitten by

the man), languages (and the cognitive mechanisms for encoding them) must provide

some means for securing intended relationships among entities across variations in the

positions in which they occur. In theories of language production the maintenance of this

equation is the responsibility of functional processing (Garrett, 1988).

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The nature of the functional equation that is formulated during production is

unknown, but an attractive hypothesis involves the construction (Goldberg, 1995). A

construction is a scheme that relates a set of thematic roles to a set of structural positions.

For example, in the sentence The man gave the girl the present, the agent is the man, the

patient is the present, and the goal is the girl. This sentences has three structural

positions, subject, object, and second object. The dative construction provides a mapping

to causes the agent to map to subject, the goal to map into direct object, and the patient to

map into second object position. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the role of

constructions in language production using the methodology of structural priming.

Structural priming builds on the phenomenon of structural repetition. Structural

repetition is seen in a tendency to reuse a previously produced sentence structure in a

new, otherwise unrelated utterance {Bock, 1986 #38}. For example, after producing a

sentence like The artist showed the police captain a sketch, speakers were more likely to

describe a subsequent picture using an analogous structure than if they had produced a

structurally different priming sentence like The artist showed a sketch to the police

captain. That is, having formulated one double-object structure, speakers were more

likely to use another double-object structure (e.g., The children are giving the teacher

flowers). Conversely, the production of a prepositional dative was associated with an

increased likelihood of using a prepositional dative later on (e.g., The children are giving

flowers to the teacher). Speakers thus tend to generalize structure from one sentence to

another. The existence of this generalization makes it possible to probe the nature of the

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information that promotes it, exploring the kinds of relationships that support alternative

arrangements of constituents in sentences.

A constructional account of functional processing predicts that constituents that

play the same thematic roles in sentences should tend to occur in the same structural

roles. Standing in the way of this kind of account is evidence that structural repetition

does not hinge on the identity of thematic roles in prime and target sentences. Bock and

Loebell (1990) found that prepositional locatives (The wealthy widow drove the

Mercedes to the church) prime prepositional dative picture descriptions to the same

degree as prepositional dative primes (The wealthy widow gave the Mercedes to the

church) relative to double object controls (The wealthy widow gave the church the

Mercedes). The prepositional locative and the prepositional dative share a similar

structure (NP V NP PP), but they arguably differ in the event role of the prepositional

argument. In the prepositional locative, the prepositional phrase encodes the location of

the action, while in the dative it encodes the recipient of the action.

In another experiment, Bock and Loebell found even stronger evidence against a

purely thematic construal of structural repetition. Locatives like The 747 was landing by

the control tower primed passive utterances as much as passives like The 747 was alerted

by the control tower, relative to active prime controls like The 747 radioed the control

tower. The locatives and passives had similar syntactic structures (NP AUX V PP), but

the locatives had agents as subjects, while the passives had patients as subjects. These

results suggest that structural repetition does not demand overlap in the thematic roles of

prime and target sentences.

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More puzzling from the standpoint of the constructional hypothesis is that role

overlap did not promote structural repetition: Locatives and passives were equally

effective primes, suggesting that the roles of the constituents did not influence their

positioning. Instead, Bock et al. (1992) proposed that basic conceptual features help to

regulate functional mapping. Bock et al. varied the animacy of the subjects of active and

passive sentences, and found that the presence of an animate subject in priming sentences

increased the tendency to make animate entities the subjects of target sentences. Because

this type of priming occurred over and above the general tendency to re-use the active or

passive structure of priming sentences, the implication is that thematic roles per se may

not participate in functional mapping. At the same time, elemental conceptual features

(like animacy, which is a dimension of event-role taxonomies that distinguish agents

from instruments, beneficiaries from goals, and so on) promoted similar positioning -- as

subjects -- of like constituents between primes and targets.

The paradox in these findings is that aspects of both sentence meaning (the

animacy of subjects) and sentence structure (active and passive form) appeared to be

susceptible to priming, when the functional mapping itself was not. This clashes with a

constructional account, where there is no dissociation between structures and the

meanings that they encode.

There is nonetheless a feature of existing research on structural repetition that

makes these results consistent with a constructional approach. Because English typically

confounds the structural position of a phrase with its thematic properties, it is difficult to

create changes to the thematic properties of a prime without corresponding changes to its

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structural properties. For this reason, the correspondence between thematic roles and

syntactic functions in English has been manipulated in just one sentence position, leaving

the normal correlation in other positions mostly intact. For example, in Bock et al.

(1992), animacy and structure were manipulated independently in the priming sentences,

but not in the targets: In the targets, selection of an animate subject controlled the choice

of the sentence structure; alternatively, selection of a sentence structure controlled the

animacy of the subject. Such manipulations, relying on a single role variation to drive a

change in functional processing, may be insufficient to create consistent differences. In

contrast, the structural components of repetition have been supported by the entire gross

configuration of priming sentences.

Beginning with Pickering and Branigan (1998), more recent work has shown that

the magnitude of structural priming can increase substantially with overlap in semantic

and lexical content. Conversely, Bencini, Bock, and Goldberg (in preparation) replicated

Bock and Loebell’s locative/passive priming results, but showed that priming was

reduced when the preposition by was changed, suggesting that sharing of the preposition

can support passive priming. Finally, by creating overlap in two thematic roles, Hare and

Goldberg (1999) found evidence of thematic-role priming using the provide-with

construction and the double object construction. The provide-with construction (e.g. The

army provided the soldiers with blankets) has the same syntactic structure as the

prepositional dative (NP V NP PP), but the object argument is the recipient of the action

of the verb. This makes the structure similar to the double object construction, which

also puts the recipient directly after the verb. Hare and Goldberg found that speakers

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tended to produce more double object expressions after provide-with sentences as well as

after double object sentences, relative to the production of prepositional datives. This

suggests that the order of thematic roles can be primed. However, because Hare and

Goldberg used the dative alternation, where the patient and recipient differ in animacy,

the results could be explained in the same terms as Bock et al. (1992) rather than in terms

of thematic roles proper.

To achieve a straightforward test of event role priming without the intrusion of

animacy or the confounding influence of structural repetition requires a different tactic.

What is needed are constructions in which the order of constituents varies without

corresponding changes in syntactic structure or the animacy of the arguments. One type

of sentence that fulfills these demands is the locative alternation {Levin, 1993 #356;

Anderson, 1971 #357; Rappaport, 1985 #355}, also called the spray-load alternation.

This alternation varies the order of the theme (the object that moves) and the location (the

place that is moved to), both of which are typically inanimate. For example, in The man

sprayed the wax on the car, wax is the theme and car is its final location. The alternative

structure puts the location before the theme, as in The man sprayed the car with the wax.

The structure itself is nonetheless the same, so priming of the structural configuration

should not differ. But if the order of the roles matters, then we should see theme-location

structures (with the theme role preceding the location role) priming other theme-location

structures more than location-theme structures (with the location role preceding the

theme role).

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Since spray-load constructions are not easy to elicit reliably with picture

description, we needed another task in which structural repetition occurs. One such task

is Potter and Lombardi’s (1998) rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sentence

repetition paradigm. In this paradigm, participants simply read sentences that were

shown on a computer screen, one word at a time, at a fairly fast rate. They then

performed a distractor task before being asked to repeat the sentence aloud. Because of

the difficulty of explicitly remembering the surface forms of sentences, along with the

high speed of presentation and the intervening task, speakers sometimes changed the

syntactic structure of the sentences. Using this procedure, Potter and Lombardi (1998)

found a tendency to reuse previously produced structures, which they attributed to

structural priming.

Because this technique is relatively new, we wanted to replicate Potter and

Lombardi's (1998) results using materials that were previously employed in picture

description paradigms, to gain information about the relative strength of priming effects.

We therefore performed two experiments, one with the dative alternation and a second

with the spray-load alternation.

Two competing hypotheses were tested. The first, which we call the no-roles

hypothesis, claims that the message representations that support sentence production do

not individuate thematic roles as primitives, making it impossible to prime the roles

themselves. The second hypothesis, which we call the construction hypothesis, says that

event roles are a proper part of the messages that drive production mechanisms. The

hypotheses make the same predictions for the dative experiment, because either animacy

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or thematic roles (the order of the patient and goal) could support priming. But in the

spray-load experiment, the no-roles hypothesis predicts no difference in priming between

the different orders of theme and location, while the construction hypothesis predicts just

such a difference.

Experiment 1: Dative Priming

The first study was designed to replicate work finding structural priming with

dative sentences using the RSVP production paradigm {Potter, 1998 #22}. We also

varied the preposition used in the target sentence to see if there were variations in the

likelihood of priming for datives with slightly different roles.

Method

Participants

Sixty-one students from the University of Illinois took part in the experiment,

receiving partial credit toward fulfillment of an introductory psychology course

requirement. A total of 48 students were included in the analyses. The remaining

participants were excluded because of experimenter errors (2), non-native English speech

(1), empty cells (2), or unusually low rates of codable prime and target repetitions (8).

Materials

There were 16 dative items. Each one contained noun phrases representing a

theme and goal after the verb, either as the direct object or the object of a prepositional

phrase (see Table 1 for examples). Two types of datives were used, transfer datives and

benefactive datives. Transfer datives have a verb that requires the preposition to in the

prepositional dative form. Benefactive datives have a verb that requires the preposition

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for in the prepositional dative form. Both types of datives occurred in dative structures,

the prepositional structure and the double-object structure. Items were formed by pairing

a transfer and a benefactive dative. The prime occurred in both structures, but the target

dative was always in the double object form, to reduce the overall number of NP V NP

PP structures in the experiment as a whole. The pairings of prime and target were made

so as to minimize the lexical and semantic overlap between the members of each pair.

Table 1 illustrates one item, and the Appendix lists all of the experimental sentences.

In addition to the experimental items there were 288 filler sentences (32 sentences

from Experiment 2 act as fillers in this experiment). The fillers came from a variety of

constructions: Unaccusatives (The woman ran three miles a day), unergatives (The

politican coughed), there structures (There were free cookies yesterday), truncated

passives (The usual suspects were rounded up), clefts (It is strange to think that the

Beaver has grown up), copulas (The beautiful child was as good as gold), tough

movement structures (The anger of the crowd was hard to understand), locative inversion

structures (On the table were pancakes and coffee), that complements (The professor

believed that only half the class was enrolled), infinitival complements (The students

wanted to cancel class). The fillers were designed to avoid structures that might prime

prepositional phrases at the end of sentences, and to avoid lexical overlap with each other

and the target sentences.

Lists were assembled from the filler and experimental sentences so as to create

what appeared to be a series of 320 unrelated sentences. Embedded in the series were 16

sequences of two sentences derived from the experimental items. These constituted the

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priming trials, each with a prime and target sentence. Eight versions of each prime-target

pair were created (2 orders x 2 structures x 2 verb types). There were two orders of the

sentences in an item. For each of these orders, the prime could occur in one of the two

structures. The target had either transitive or benefactive verbs, with the prime verb type

always mismatching that of the target.

To counterbalance experimental conditions, eight lists were created. One order of

the 16 priming trials (ordered in terms of the respective experimental items from which

the trials were created) was devised to rotate through the eight lists, with eight different

starting points within the rotation. Each list started with four items with prepositional

dative primes followed by a set of four items with double object primes, and this order

was repeated. The target verb type was alternated for each item. The fillers were

randomly ordered and this order was same regardless of the rotation of priming trials.

This served to distribute practice and fatigue effects across experimental items and

conditions while keeping their relative positions with respect to one another roughly the

same. The priming trials were separated by a total of 18 sentences (8 fillers, a prime and

target pair from Experiment 2., and another 8 fillers).

Procedure

Participants were tested individually, seated in front of a computer terminal in a

sound-attenuated room. Experimental trials were controlled by a Macintosh Quadra 800

running PsyScope software (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, Provost, 1993) with the

PsyScope button box. The monitor was an Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display (AK8

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M2494) monitor. Participants viewed the screen from a distance of approximately 17

inches.

One sentence from the experimental list was presented on every trial. Figure 1

shows the sequence and timing of trial events. Each trial had three phases: a reading

phase, a number comparison phase, and a speaking phase. These phases unfolded

continuously, with the timing indicated in the figure, so that participants experienced an

uninterrupted series of stimulus and response events.

In the reading phase, participants silently read a sentence presented one word at a

time, which they were instructed to remember for later recall. This phase began with a

200 ms fixation prompt, which was a horizontal array of 5 asterisks in the center of the

screen. Then the words of the sentence were presented for 100 ms each in the center of

the screen.

Next came the number comparison phase, which was designed to obstruct

rehearsal of the to-be-remembered sentence and thereby decrease the likelihood of rote

recall. In this phase participants saw a horizontal array of five single-digit numbers for

533 ms, followed after 100 ms by a number written out as a word, which served as a

probe. It was displayed for 500 ms. A prompt for a yes or no response followed the

probe, and participants were supposed to indicate by a button press whether the

corresponding number had been in the list of digits. The prompt remained until the

participant pressed either the left (mapped to no) or the right (mapped to yes) on the

button box. Feedback about the response appeared for 500 ms (a happy face for a correct

response and a sad face for an incorrect response).

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The final phase was speaking, when participants were to recall the sentence that

they had seen in the reading phase. This phase began immediately after number

comparison with a blank screen for 500 ms. Production was prompted with the word

“Repeat” centered on the screen, directing participants to produce the sentence that they

had just seen. The word “Repeat” stayed on the screen until participants pressed the

center button on the button box, to signal completion of the sentence.

Words and numbers were presented in 14-point Courier font. The sentence

productions were recorded on a Sony Digital Audio Tape Deck (DTC-ZE700) through a

Shure head-worn microphone (SM10A) amplified by an Optimus SA-155 Integrated

Stereo Amplifier.

From the participant's point of view, the sequences of sentences that constituted

primes and targets were not readily discriminable from the sequences of filler sentences.

The participants were not told about any of the differences in the sentences across the

various trials, or of potential relationships between successive trials. Objectively,

however, filler-sentence trials differed from prime and target trials during the number-

comparison phase. Filler trials had either yes or no answers, and on positive trials the to-

be-verified number could appear anywhere in the array. Prime and target trials always

had yes answers and the to-be-verified numbers were always either the leftmost or

rightmost numbers in the number list, to decrease the occurrence of incorrect responses

on these trials.

Participants received the following instructions on the screen:

In this experiment, you will be doing two things. The first is reading and remembering a sentence. To do this, you will read a sentence one word at a time,

Thematic Roles 15

and then you will be asked to repeat the sentence. The second task is a number comparison task. In this task, you will see five numbers, like this

4 5 2 9 1 Then the numbers will disappear, and you will be shown a number, like this

TwoYou should decide whether this number was in the list of numbers you saw before. Press the “yes” button if it was on this list, and the “no” button if it wasn’t.

The hard part about this experiment is that you have to do the number task in the middle of the sentence task. So you will read the sentence word by word, and then you will do the number test, and then you will say the sentence when you see the word “Repeat”. Here is how the experiment will proceed.

Press Yellow The couple skated gracefully.############ 4 5 2 9 1 two no yes ( press the “yes” button)happy or sad face (happy means correct, sad means incorrect) Repeat (say “the couple skated gracefully”)Press yellow button to continue

So, you will press the yellow button to start. Then you will see the sentence followed by ##########. Then you will see the list of numbers, and then the number word. You will be prompted to press no or yes on the button box. Then you will see a happy or sad face depending on whether you gave the right answer. Finally, you will see the word Repeat and you should recall the sentence as best you can. If you can’t remember the sentence exactly, try to put it into your own words. To continue the experiment, you will press the yellow button.If you have any questions, please ask the experimenter.

After the participants finished reading the instructions, the experimenter paraphrased

them and led the participant through the trial session from the instructions. The

participants then began the experiment, which led off with the 8 filler trials that preceded

the first experimental trial. Each experimental session took approximately 45 minutes.

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Design. The data was analyzed with a 2x2 repeated measures ANOVAs, one with

participants as the replication factor (F1) and one with items as the replication factor

(F2). The two factors, prime structure and verb type, were within-subject and within-

item.

Scoring. The tapes of the experimental sessions were transcribed by editing a file

that contained a list of the prime and target sentences as the participants had originally

seen them. The sentences were edited so that they matched what the speakers had

produced on the tapes, including partially produced words, rephrasing, and pauses.

The transcribed responses were categorized with respect to the constituents of the

presented sentences and the structures of the utterances produced. The utterances could

be scored either as prepositional datives (The artist showed a sketch to the police captain)

or double object (The artist showed the police captain a sketch). Prepositional datives had

to fit the template “A verb B preposition C” and double objects the template “A verb C

B” where A was the presented subject noun phrase (e.g.. The artist), B was the noun

phrase representing the theme (e.g., the sketch), and C was the noun phrase representing

the goal. The same scoring procedures were applied to both prime and target responses.

Pauses and minor changes in tense, number, and articles were ignored. Other changes in

form (including content-word changes) caused responses to be excluded from the

analyses. This conservative coding was used in all analyses reported, but similar results

were achieved with a looser coding that allowed all alternating structures regardless of

their fidelity to the presented sentence.

Thematic Roles 17

A trial was considered valid if both the prime and targets were scored as a double

object or prepositional dative. Participants whose overall percentage of valid trials was

less than 50% were excluded. To insure that the participants were the same for both

experiment 1 and experiment 2, participants were also excluded if their percentage of

valid trials for experiment 2 was less than 50%. Eight participants were excluded

because they did not meet this criterion, and they were replaced. Overall, the participants

who met the criterion recalled 77% of the dative sentences in one of the two forms, with a

range of 50 –100 %. Two other participants yielded empty cells, and were also replaced.

Differences were considered significant when their associated probabilities were

less than or equal to .05.

Results

Table 2 shows the raw counts and the proportions of prepositional dative

structures produced out of all datives in each condition. Because the dative targets were

all in double object form, the overall number of prepositional datives is low. Analyses of

variance were carried out on both participants and items with prime type (prepositional

dative or double object dative) and verb type (transfer or benefactive verb) as within-

subject and within-item variables. Given a prepositional dative prime, participants were

significantly more likely to change the subsequent target to a prepositional dative

sentence (.06) than they were after a double object prime (.01), F1(1,47) = 12.11.

F2(1,15) = 7.35. Target verb type (transfer or benefactive) did not make a difference in

the number of prepositional datives produced (F1(1,47) = 0.13; F2(1,15) = 0.09). These

two effects also did not interact significantly (F1(1,47) = 0.20; F2(1,15) = 0.14).

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Participants were accurate at the number comparison task, getting 92% correct on

datives and 91% for the fillers.

Discussion

Speakers were approximately 5% more likely to produce a prepositional dative

after a prepositional dative than after a double object prime. So, even though speakers

were engaged in a sentence memory task, where they were supposed to repeat a double

object sentence, they were also sensitive to the structure of the previously produced

sentence. Furthermore, we did not find reliably greater structural priming for either

target verb type, which further supports the view that structural repetition is not

dependent on lexical factors {Bock, 1989 #35}. These findings support the idea that

picture description and RSVP production tasks tap the same structural priming

phenomenon.

This replicates the findings of Potter and Lombardi (1998), although our priming

effects are smaller in magnitude than theirs. One possible reason for this is that the

structure examined in Experiment 2 was structurally similar to the prepositional dative.

Because the experiments were run at the same time, this similarity could have reduced

the novelty of the prepositional dative structure. If structural priming is a type of implicit

learning {Chang, 2000 #5}, then we might expect that the novelty of a structure within an

experiment to be important for the magnitude of priming.

Experiment 2: Spray-load Alternation

Thematic Roles 19

To test whether a representation that encodes the order of event roles can be

primed in the absence of differences in the syntactic structures, we examined whether

spray-load sentences would prime the same structure in other spray-load sentences.

Method

Participants and procedure

The same participants and procedures were used in experiments 1 and 2, because

the materials for both experiments were interleaved in the lists.

Materials

There were 16 spray-load alternation items. Each one contained noun phrases

representing a theme and location after the verb, either as the direct object or the object of

a prepositional phrase. Two types of spray-load items were used, theme-locative and

locative-theme. Theme-locatives place the theme in the object position, and the location

in a prepositional phrase with a directional preposition. Locative-themes place the

location in the object position, and the theme in a prepositional phrase with the

preposition with. Items were formed by pairing two of these locative sentences, so that

each item was made up of a pair of locatives in both of their structures. The pairing of

items was designed to minimize the semantic similarity in the actions. For example,

liquid-propulsion actions like “spray” and “splattered” were paired with non-liquid-

propulsion actions like “jammed” or “engraved”. Table 3 illustrates one item in all four

conditions, and the Appendix lists all of the experimental sentences.

Eight versions of each prime-target pair were created (2 orders x 2 prime structure

x 2 target structure). There were two orders of the sentences in an item. For each of

Thematic Roles 20

these orders, the prime and targets could occur in both of the two structures. To

counterbalance experimental conditions, eight orders were created. One order of the 16

priming trials (ordered in terms of the respective experimental items from which the trials

were created) was devised to rotate through the eight lists, with eight different starting

points within the rotation. In each order, the prime structure alternated for each item.

The target structure alternated in an ABBA order. These orders were embedded into the

same lists as Experiment 1., separated by 8 fillers, before and after, from the next dative

trial.

Design

The data were analyzed with a 2x2 repeated measures ANOVAs, one with

participants as the replication factor (F1) and one with items as the replication factor

(F2). The two factors, prime structure and verb type, were within-subject and within-

item.

Scoring

The scoring of the responses followed the same procedure used in Experiment 1.

Transcribers edited a file that contained a list of prime and target sentences to make them

conform to what the speakers produced.

The transcribed responses were categorized with respect to the constituents of the

presented sentences and the structures of the utterances produced. The utterances could

be scored either as locative-themes (“The witch doctor stuck the doll with pins”) or

theme-locatives (“The witch doctor stuck pins into the doll”). Locative-themes had to fit

the template “A verb B with C” and theme-locatives the template “A verb C PREP B”,

Thematic Roles 21

where A was the presented subject noun phrase (e.g.. The witch doctor), B was the noun

phrase representing the theme (e.g., the pins), C was the noun phrase representing the

location (e.g., the doll), and PREP was a preposition other than with. The same scoring

procedure was applied to both prime and target responses. Pauses and minor changes in

tense, number, and articles were ignored. Other changes in form (including content-word

changes) caused responses to be excluded from the analyses. As in the dative

experiment, a looser coding yielded similar results. These participants recalled 77% of

the spray-load sentences in one of the two forms with a range of 50 –100 %.

Results

Table 4 shows the raw counts and proportions of locative-theme structures

produced out of all locatives in each condition. Analyses of variance were carried out on

both participants and items with prime type (theme-locative and locative-theme) and

target type (theme-locative and locative-theme) as within-subject and within-item

variables.

Participants displayed priming, being more likely to produce locative-theme

sentences after locative-theme primes (.415) than after theme-locative primes (.335),

F1(1,47) = 9.07, p < 0.005; F2(1,15) = 6.11, p < 0.03. There was also a main effect of

given target sentence type (F1(1,47) = 322.82; p < 0.0001; F2(1,15) = 717.28; p <

0.0001), where participants tended to use the target structure that they were given

(location-theme = .71, theme-location = 0.04). These two effects did not interact

significantly (F1(1,47) = 0.27; F2(1,15) = .002).

Thematic Roles 22

Participants were accurate at the number comparison task, getting 94% correct for

spray-load sentences.

Discussion

The results show that speakers tend to use the primed sentence structure when

they produced the target sentence. Since the primes differed in the order of roles, rather

than syntactic structure, these results support the idea that the order of roles can be

primed. This priming effect was relative to a general tendency to use the target structure

that they were given, as the main effect for target structure shows. These results also

suggest that lexical overlap did not increase spray-load priming. The theme-locative

structure uses a variety of prepositions to mark the locative role, while the locative-theme

structure uses only the preposition with. If the preposition with increased the tendency to

use the locative-theme structure in the target, we would expect that theme-locative targets

would change more to locative-themes than locative-theme targets would change to

theme-locatives. This would show up in the interaction between prime structure and

target structure. The fact that this interaction was not significant suggests that priming

was due primarily to the order of event roles, regardless of lexical overlap.

Discussion

The results from the two experiments were clear. The first experiment replicated

previous work showing that people tended to reuse previously produced structures, in the

RSVP paradigm, demonstrating structural priming with datives without lexical overlap.

The second experiment provided the critical test between two hypotheses about

functional processing – the no-roles and the construction hypotheses. We found that the

Thematic Roles 23

order of thematic roles in the prime elicited a similar ordering of those roles in the target.

This result cannot be explained by the no-roles account, and supports the construction

hypothesis.

The construction hypothesis suggests that priming of the order of thematic roles

could explain some of the priming results that have previously supported the view that

priming was purely syntactic. A constructional approach to production would say that

the elements of the message select a construction which is used to map roles into a phrase

order. In this processing theory, using a construction would increase its ability to be used

again, and that would be the basis for priming. Also, priming effects would transfer from

constructions to other related constructions. So for example, prepositional locative and

prepositional datives (Bock & Loebell, 1990) share the cause-motion construction even

though the verbs differ in terms of the participants that they provide. So priming of the

cause-motion construction allows priming to transfer from the prepositional locative

(with a transitive verb) to the dative construction. Since the magnitude of priming is the

same between the prepositional locative and the prepositional dative, we might need to

conclude that priming transfers between constructions without diminishment, or that

priming only effects the most abstract versions of the construction.

The one difficult result for the constructional account is the independence of

animacy and structural priming in results of Bock, Loebell, & Morey (1992).

Constructions are sensitive to the meanings that they are trying to convey, and therefore,

one should be more likely to select a construction if the appropriate semantic constraints

are present. But if this were true, then we should expect an interaction of animacy order

Thematic Roles 24

with structural priming, along the lines of the mediated mapping theory. Constructions

could account for the Bock, et al. (1992) results if active and passive constructions were

insensitive to the animacy of their arguments, and there was a second animacy

construction that would map animate arguments before inanimate arguments. Also, one

would need to have a selection algorithm that was sensitive to multiple constructions, in

order to get the independence of animacy and syntactic structure. While it is possible to

explain the results of Bock, et al. (1992) in constructional terms, this approach is

inconsistent with the spirit of construction grammar, with its tight linkages between

meaning and form.

Another approach to reconciling our spray-load results with previous work is to

elaborate ideas proposed in Bock, et al. (1992). They proposed that semantic features

(like animacy) directly influenced syntactic functions, without being mediated by

thematic roles. In this approach, thematic roles are not atomic entities, but rather they are

emergent categories that arise out of mapping of features to syntactic positions (Dowty,

1991). To see how this works, let us examine the production of the sentence “The man

gave the woman the book”. The message for this sentence would include a verb (GAVE)

and three participants, MAN, WOMAN, BOOK. Subject selection would depend on

several feature such as animacy, causality, motion (Dowty, 1991). The element in the

message that best matched the subject feature set (in this case the MAN) would get

selected as subject. Another set of features would be used for object selection, such as

affectedness, and the remaining element which best matched these features would be

selected.

Thematic Roles 25

How would features explain structural priming? In priming, links between

features and syntactic functions would be strengthen during the processing of the prime,

and that would lead to the greater use of that feature in the target. So animacy order

priming in Bock, et al. (1992) would be due to a strengthening of the tendency for

animate entities to be selected for subject. If syntactic structure depended on other

features like causality, then that would lead to independence of animacy-order and

structural priming. A similar featural approach could be used to explain our spray-load

results. The spray-load alternation involves an alternation in the order of the theme and

location. While the theme and location do not typically differ in animacy, they do differ

systematically in that themes tend to be liquids or mass objects (water, jam, hay) and

locations tend to be count nouns representing point locations. Spray-load priming might

involve priming of links between mass/count features and the object syntactic function.

In this case, thematic roles, as atomic entities, would not be necessary to explain the

results. This featural account of syntactic function assignment is consistent with

linguistic work on the spray-load construction suggesting that there is a meaning

difference between the two versions of the alternation, because different surface orders

will have different semantic feature associations, which naturally accounts for meaning

differences. The location-theme (“The man sprayed the wall with water”) is argued to

have a more “holistic” interpretation of the action on the location (i.e. the wall is totally

covered with water) than the theme-location version (“The man sprayed water on the

wall”). The featural approach naturally explains why the location-theme version is

interpreted as “holistic”, because object selection depends on affectedness of the object,

Thematic Roles 26

and so if the location is highly affected by the action (as in the “holistic” interpretation),

it is natural that it should be selected as the object (Dowty, 1991).

The featural approach to syntactic function assignment postulates that thematic

roles, as atomic entities, do not play an important role in production. But, structural

priming sometimes seems to involve the biasing of different arguments relative to the

other arguments. For example, in Bock & Loebell (1990), the infinitival transitive

(“Sally brought a book to study”) primed prepositional datives less significantly than the

prepositional dative (“Sally brought a book to Stella”), even though object selection

would arguably use the same features in each case (the object book is affected in both

cases by the action of the verb). These results make more sense if we think of the

prepositional dative prime sentences biasing the patient before goal, while the infinitival

transitive does not have another noun argument to bias the patient relative to. The

weakness of the featural approach is that it isolates priming to links between features and

syntactic functions, and does not have a mechanism for letting roles compete with each

other for sentence positions.

We found no evidence that the repetition of closed-class elements contributed to

priming, consistent with other results (Bock, 1989; Pickering & Branigan, 1998). While

Pickering & Branigan (1998) found that the verb repetition increased dative structural

priming, they also found that tense, aspect, and number of the verb had little effect, which

they argue further supports the view that priming occurs at a level abstracted from the

surface morphological/phonological information (although see Bencini, et al, in

preparation, for evidence that there is some influence of close class elements).

Thematic Roles 27

The finding that verb semantics can increase dative structural priming is consistent with

other work suggesting that verbs record the order of arguments that follow them

(Ferreira, 1996; Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997). The idea that verbs are

special sentence elements suggests another way to reconcile the featural and

constructional approaches. Since the strongest evidence against thematic roles occurs in

the transitive construction, subject selection is best captured by the strengthening of

feature and syntactic function links. But if verbs activate thematic roles, then object

selection might depend more on the relative ordering of thematic roles. This would

provide a unified account of dative and spray-load results, as well as explain the lack of

priming from infinitival transitive to prepositional datives. This account also might help

to explain why close class items can influence transitive priming (Bencini, Bock, &

Goldberg, in preparation), but does not influence arguments after the verb as in the spray-

load study, and in dative structures.

The complexity of the structural priming literature is growing, requiring more

subtle and complex theoretical approaches. While the experiments in this paper do not

resolve the debate between the different theories, it provides important evidence for

ordering processes that cannot be explained by overlap in syntactic structure, lexical

items, and animacy. This result makes it clear that theories that posit that structural

priming influences only a single type of representation are no longer able to explain all of

the available data. Rather, we need theory of priming which relates meaning to syntactic

structures, and explains the conditions which different factors have their effects. While a

theory that involves multiple levels of representation is less parsimonious than an account

Thematic Roles 28

that makes use of a single level of representation, it is more consistent with work on the

mechanism of structural priming. Because structural priming lasts over the processing of

intervening sentences and/or time delays, Bock & Griffin (2000) argue that the

mechanism of structural priming is implicit language learning. Since language learning

involves learning the links between multiple levels of representation, it might not be

surprising that structural priming would also need a multi-level theory to explain the

changes that occur when we use our notions to create sentence sequences.

Thematic Roles 29

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173-218). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Bencini, G., Bock, K., & Goldberg, A. E. (in preparation).

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contributions to sentence formulation. Psychological Review, 89, 1-47.

Bock, J. K. (1986a). Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence

production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, &

Cognition, 12(4)

Bock, J. K. (1986b). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology,

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Bock, K., Loebell, H., & Morey, R. (1992). From conceptual roles to structural relations:

Bridging the syntactic cleft. Psychological Review, 99(1), 150-171.

Chang, F., Dell, G. S., Bock, K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). Structural priming as implicit

learning: A comparison of models of sentence production. Journal of

Psycholinguistic Research, 29(2), 217-229.

Thematic Roles 30

Ferreira, V. S. (1996). Is it better to give than to donate? Syntactic flexibility in language

production. Journal of Memory & Language, 35(5) Oct 1996.

Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions : a construction grammar approach to argument

structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Osgood, C. E., & Bock, J. K. (1977). Salience and sentencing: Some production

principles. In S. Rosenberg (Ed.), Sentence Production: Developments in research

and theory (pp. 89-140). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Potter, M. C., & Lombardi, L. (1998). Syntactic priming in immediate recall of sentences.

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Rappaport, M., & Levin, B. (1985). A study in lexical analysis: The locative alternation:

Bar Ilan University, Northwestern University.

Thematic Roles 31

Table 1

Example Dative Items:

Prime TargetPrepositional Dative (Benefactive)An artist drew a sketch for the police captain.

TransferA soldier offered his pal a cigarette.

Double Object (Benefactive)An artist drew the police captain a sketch.Prepositional Dative (Transfer)An artist showed a sketch to the police captain.

BenefactiveA soldier saved his pal a cigarette.

Double Object (Transfer)An artist showed the police captain a sketch.

Thematic Roles 32

Table 2: Counts and Proportions of Prepositional Dative Structures in Experiment 1

Prime Target Counts (Proportion)Prepositional Dative (Benefactive) Transfer 10 (0.060)Double Object (Benefactive) Transfer 1 (0.006)Prepositional Dative (Transfer) Benefactive 10 (0.058)Double Object (Transfer) Benefactive 3 (0.02)

Thematic Roles 33

Table 3: Example Spray-load Sentences in Experiment 2

Prime TargetTheme-locativeThe maid rubbed polish onto the table.

Theme-locativeThe farmer heaped the straw onto the wagon.Locative-theme

The maid rubbed the table with polish.Theme-locativeThe maid rubbed polish onto the table.

Locative-themeThe farmer heaped the wagon with straw.Locative-theme

The maid rubbed the table with polish.

Thematic Roles 34

Table 4: Counts and Proportions of Locative-theme Structures

Prime Target Counts (Proportion)Locative-theme Locative-theme 121 (.791)Theme-locative Locative-theme 105 (.705)Locative-theme Theme-locative 12 (.076)Theme-locative Theme-locative 1 (.006)

Thematic Roles 35

Figure 1.

*****

200 msecs

The100 msecs

politician100 msecs

coughed 100 msecs

############0 msecs

4 5 2 9 1533 msecs

100 msecs

two500 msecs

No Yes

500 msecs (blank screen)

500 msecs

Repeat

Thematic Roles 36

Appendix:

Dative Items:Each Cell holds two prime target pairs. The first pair has a benefac-tive-dative prime followed by transfer-dative target. The second pair has a transfer-dative prime and a benefactive-dative target.

Benefactive PrimeTransfer TargetTransfer PrimeBenefactive Target

An artist drew a sketch for the police captain.A soldier offered his pal a cigarette.An artist showed a sketch to the police captain.A soldier saved his pal a cigarette.


The caterers fixed a free banquet for the Lions Club.A carpenter took the preschooler a little birdhouse.The caterers awarded a free banquet to the Lions Club.A carpenter made the preschooler a little birdhouse.


A cheerleader saved a seat for her friend.Roger mailed Sally a portrait of his horse.A cheerleader offered a seat to her friend.Roger painted Sally a portrait of his horse.


The detective purchased a rawhide bone for his German shepherd.The chef passed the butler some Eggs Benedict.The detective threw a rawhide bone to his German shepherd.The chef cooked the butler some Eggs Benedict.


A woodcarver whittled a toy duck for the orphan.The children mailed the company a picture.A woodcarver promised a toy duck to the orphan.The children painted the company a picture.


The grandmother sewed a quilt for her granddaughter.The eccentric old man passed Sally some chicken.The grandmother sent a quilt to her granddaughter.The eccentric old man cooked Sally some chicken.


A secretary was baking a cake for her boss.The librarian read the handicapped boy a short story.A secretary was taking a cake to her boss.The librarian wrote the handicapped boy a short story.


The manager was baking some peanut brittle for her cousins.An architect showed the company's president a design.The manager was taking some peanut brittle to her cousins.An architect drew the company's president a design.


The oil sheik bought a Rolls Royce for his mistress.The teenager handed his brother a model ship.The oil sheik gave a Rolls Royce to his mistress.The teenager built his brother a model ship.


The principal wrote a letter of recommendation for the teacher.The duchess was loaning the gardener a weedeater.The principal read a letter of recommendation to the teacher.The duchess was buying the gardener a weedeater.

Thematic Roles 37


A relative bought some flowers for the patient.A maid tossed the hotel guest a towel.A relative gave some flowers to the patient.A maid found the hotel guest a towel.


A rock star got some pure cocaine for his manager.The restaurant awarded the customer a dinner.A rock star sold some pure cocaine to his manager.The restaurant fixed the customer a dinner.


A guard found some keys for the prison warden.The stepfather promised his stepson a boomerang.A guard tossed some keys to the prison warden.The stepfather whittled his stepson a boomerang.


A waitress made a tray of appetizers for the customers.A trapper sold the explorer some valuable furs.A waitress took a tray of appetizers to the customers.A trapper got the explorer some valuable furs.


An inventor built a mousetrap for his elderly mother.The woman was loaning her neighbor a ladder.An inventor handed a mousetrap to his elderly mother.The woman was buying her neighbor a ladder.

Spray-load items:Each sentence in each pair occurred as prime and target, in both theme-locative and locative-theme structure.

The Naval officer draped the flag over the coffin.Sheila sprinkled some cinnamon onto her toast.The contractor plastered stucco onto the wall.The biologist injected an antibiotic into the rat.The performer packed all of his belongings into the suitcase.The butcher wrapped newspaper around the fish.The undertaker engraved the date onto the tombstone.The chef sprayed oil onto the pan.The short order cook spattered grease on his apron.The deliveryman loaded boxes onto the truck.The fashion model powdered rouge onto her cheeks.The bus splashed water on the pedestrian.The gardener planted daffodils on the hillside.The game contestant crammed the dollar bills into his pockets.The witch doctor stuck pins into the doll.The home economics teacher brushed butter onto the turkey.The housecleaner stacked dishes on the countertop.Dad stuffed treats into the stockings.The maid rubbed polish onto the table.The farmer heaped straw onto the wagon.The medic swabbed alcohol onto the wound.The couple etched their initials into the tree.The preschooler splattered paint onto the floor.The policeman jammed the demonstrators into the paddy wagon.

Thematic Roles 38

The prankster squirted disappearing ink onto his friend's shirt.The children tracked mud onto the carpet.The ranch hand branded a number onto the cow.The plane dusted insecticide over the crops.The technician smeared some gel onto the glass slide.The sailor tattooed a new design onto his arm.The storm showered hail onto the golf course.The new resident marked his house number on the gate.

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