title: Closed-class immanence in sentence production.
abstract: The closed-class hypothesis asserts that function words play a privileged role in syntactic processes. In language production, the claim is that such words are intrinsic to, identified with, or immanent in phrasal skeletons. Two experiments tested this hypothesis with a syntactic priming procedure. In both, subjects tended to produce utterances in the same syntactic forms as priming sentences, with the structures of the self-generated sentences varying as a function of differences in the structures of the primes. Changes in the closed-class elements of the priming sentences had no effect on this tendency over and above the impact of the structural changes. These results suggest that free-standing closed-class morphemes are not inherent components of the structural frames of English sentences.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Bock
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010700:Phonetics; D014825:Vocabulary