title: Referent Predictability is Affected by Syntactic Structure: Evidence from Chinese.
abstract: This paper examines the effect of syntactic structures on referent predictability. Focusing on stimulus-experiencer (SE) verbs, we conducted two sentence-completion experiments in Chinese by contrasting SE verbs in three structures (active canonical, active ba, and passive). The results showed that although verb semantics and discourse coherence relations produce a strong referential biases, the stimulus referent is overall less likely to be rementioned in the active canonical structure than in the other two structures. The findings thus indicate that referent predictability is determined by not only semantic but also syntactic factors. We discuss the theoretical implications for the nature of referent predictability and its relationship with referent accessibility.
authors.affiliation: Linguistics Program, 909 Welsh Humanities Building, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA. chengw22@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: Linguistics Program, 909 Welsh Humanities Building, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA.|Psychology Department, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.|Institute for Mind and Brain, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.
authors.forename: Amit
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Almor
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002681:China; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Chinese ba; Implicit causality; Implicit consequentiality; Predictability