The role of thematic role accessibility in production: evidence from Korean

ABSTRACT

Many linguistic theories suggest that thematic role accessibility influences speakers’ choice of sentence structure. We examine the nature of the relationship between thematic role accessibility and grammatical encoding by evaluating how thematic role accessibility influences grammatical function assignment and word order during on-line production of Korean. We found that role accessibility influenced word order in Korean in Experiments 1 and 2: Korean speakers were more likely to put agent nouns to an earlier sentence position than patient nouns. In Experiment 2, we also found that thematic role accessibility influenced grammatical function assignment: Korean speakers were more likely to assign agent nouns to the subject function than patient nouns. These findings suggest that thematic role accessibility affects both word order and grammatical function assignment. We discuss the implication of our results for current theories of language production.

KEYWORDS:

• Thematic role accessibility
• word order
• grammatical function assignment
• Korean
• sentence production

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although this kind of task is rather removed from natural sentence production, it nevertheless can be informative about the normal processes of sentence production. This is because in order to construct a grammatical sentence in the task, speakers have to think about the meaning of the sentence (access message level), properly assign grammatical functions to the presented words, and arrange them in an acceptable order. The task thus involves mapping a message onto linguistic form, and as such appears to reflect the biases of the normal processes of sentence production. Furthermore, it provides a sensitive and well-controlled experimental paradigm by controlling variability in speakers’ production (Ferreira, 1996); the more a task allows variability in speakers’ production, the more difficult it is to determine underlying processing mechanism.