基于经验还是基于工作记忆？--来自汉语新闻语料库中关系从句生命度格局的证据

Experience-based or Working-memory-based:Evidence from Animacy Configurations in Relative Clauses inMandarin News Corpus

在汉语主语提取、宾语提取关系从句的加工难易问题上,基于经验和基于工作记忆两大理论有不同的预测,而现有的实证研究仍存争议。文章从大型新闻语料库出发,对不同类型关系从句出现的频率以及从句内两个名词所构成的生命度格局的分布态势,进行了具体分析。研究发现,主语提取的关系从句比宾语提取的关系从句出现得更频繁,从而支持基于经验的理论。此外,双有生格局虽然在心理语言实验中被普遍采用,但在真实语料中很少出现,而分布最广的是由有生主语和无生宾语构成的对比生命度的格局。这在一定程度上诠释了实证研究结果不统一的原因。

Abstract Experience-based theories and working-memory-based theories make different predic tions on processing asymmetries between subject- and object-extracted relative clauses （RCs） in Chinese, but experimental research on Chinese RC processing has shown mixed results. This study inves tigates in a large-scale news corpus the distributional pattern of different types of RC and that of different animacy configurations within those RCs. The analyses show that subject-extracted RCs occur more frequently than object-extracted RCs, thus supporting experience-based theories. Furthermore, the double-animate configuration widely used in psycholinguistic experiments actually occurs infrequently in the corpus; instead, the contrastive animacy configuration consisting of an animate subject and inanimate object occurs more frequently. The pattern of animacy configuration found in the corpus may to some degree account for the inconsistent results in existing experimental work.