汉语领属话题句中显著性与局部性规则及其心理现实基础——来自眼动技术的证据

The Principle of Prominence and Locality in Chinese Possessive Topicalization Sentences and Its Psychological Basis:Evidence from Eye-movements

领属关系名词短语中的领有成分有时候可以分裂出来充当句子话题,对这种领属话题句成立的条件有不同的解释思路。本文对40名被试进行了汉语领属话题句合法性判断的眼球追踪实验。实验结果表明,领属话题句的允准主要受到句子成分语义关系的影响。"显著性和局部性规则"(Pan 1995;Hu 2002)等有较好的预测效果。显著性(话题和中心语的领属关系的明确性)和局部性(话题和中心语的距离远近)都影响句子的接受度与加工,但是正如Pan(1998)、胡建华(2010)的观点,汉语中显著性的影响作用更大,实验发现其普遍影响句子的接受度和加工效率、加工强度;局部性的影响主要体现在被试的阅读加工模式上。

The possessor of a possessive construction in Mandarin can be separated from its possessed and serves as the topic of a sentence,though not all possessive constructions can be topicalized this way.By examining this phenomenon with the existing theories on topicalization,it is found that semantic and pragmatic factors play an important role in the licensing of possessive topics.On the basis of concepts like Locality and Prominence,a possessive topic licensing condition is proposed which consists of Semantic Intersection Condition as the necessary condition and Most Plausibility Condition as the sufficient condition to account for the derivation of possessive topicalization,with Prominence redefined as the semantic relationship between the topic,which is the possessor,and the potential possessed in the comment part,and Locality decided by the distance between the topic and the potential possessed.To verify our proposal above,a grammaticality judgement experiment on Chinese possessive topicalization sentences was carried out with 40 participants using the eyetracking technology.The variables in the testing sentences are the topic(the possessor)at the sentence-initial position and the possessed head noun in the comment and their prominence ranking and relative locality values.The stimuli materials were designed in four groups with different combinations of prominence and locality factors,namely,high prominence-high locality(Group 1),low locality-low prominence(Group 2),high prominence-low locality(Group 3),low prominence-high locality(Group 4).20 college students who did not participate in the eye tracking experiment were invited to grade the prominence of possessor-possessed pairs in a five-point scale.Two additional groups of stimuli—40 normal topic sentences and 40 non-topic sentences—were designed as controls and fillers,respectively.To control irrelevant processing parameters,testing sentences and control groups were designed with the same paradigm,as shown in the table below:■Eye-tracking data were collected by Eyelink 1000 Plus with a sampling frequency of1000 HZ.All testing sentences were grouped into two blocks randomly and a break of 3-5 minutes was set between the blocks.Behavioral results,i.e.acceptability rate data,showed that Prominence had a higher main effect than Locality even though both Prominence and Locality had a significant impact on the testing materials.Three groups of eye movement variables were analyzed,namely,the overall measurement(total fixation counts,total fixation duration,and total regression counts on the whole testing sentence),head noun measurement(fixation duration and fixation counts on head nouns,and saccade out of the head nouns),and measurement on NP1(fixation duration and fixation counts on NP1,and saccade into NP1).For the overall measurement,only the main effect of prominence(all p<0.01)is significant,showing that the overall processing strength and efficiency is basically influenced by prominence but not by locality.For head noun measurement,regression counts showed a main effect on locality(p<0.01)but not on prominence(p=0.56).Similarly,fixation counts and fixation duration on head nouns were also influenced by locality.This effect is possibly caused by parafoveal effects which reduce processing efforts at the edges of sentences(c.f.Rayner,et al.1986,Bernhard,et al.2008,Bai,et al.2011,Schotter,et al.2012).For measurement related to NP1,the values of the control group were generally lower than those of all the four target groups,showing that the processing difficulty of the controls is significantly lower than that of the target sentences.Both Prominence and Locality play a significant role in the relevant measurements,with Prominence having a higher impact than Locality.To sum up,the prominence condition had a greater effect in that it had a major effect on various parameters,such as overall processing intensity and efficiency,regression,and topic.The locality condition,on the other hand,had a major influence on the processing modes of possessed head noun phrases which significantly increase the regression counts with longer distances between the topic and the possessed head noun.From the perspective of Generative Grammar,it has long been regarded that Locality but not Prominence has a greater impact on sentence interpretations.However,this study has verified the hypothesis of Pan(1998)and Hu(2010)that Prominence plays a more important role in Chinese than Locality,as shown in the acceptability rate and processing efficiency of possessive topic structures in Chinese,while Locality showed its effect only on processing patterns,though the mechanism behind is worthy of further exploration.