title: It is there whether you hear it or not: syntactic representation of missing arguments.
abstract: Many languages allow arguments to be omitted when they are recoverable from the context, but how do people comprehend sentences with a missing argument? We contrast a syntactically-represented account whereby people postulate a syntactic representation for the missing argument, with a syntactically-non-represented account whereby people do not postulate any syntactic representation for it. We report two structural priming experiments in Mandarin Chinese that showed that comprehension of a dative sentence with a missing direct-object argument primed the production of a full-form dative sentence (relative to an intransitive) and that it behaved similarly to a corresponding full-form dative sentence. The results suggest that people construct the same constituent structure for missing-argument sentences and full-form sentences, in accord with the syntactically-represented account. We discuss the implications for syntactic representations in language processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, United Kingdom; School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, United Kingdom. Electronic address: zhenguangcai@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Zhenguang G
authors.initials: ZG
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Martin J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Pickering
authors.affiliation: Center for Studies of Psychological Application, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, China.
authors.forename: Ruiming
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Holly P
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Branigan
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics
keywords: Argument structure; Chinese; Ellipsis; Language processing; Mental representation; Structural priming