汉语焦点副词结构加工的眼动研究——兼与英语比较

An eye-tracking study on processing Chinese focus——Comparisons with English

本文运用时间精确度毫秒级的眼动阅读研究范式,探讨汉语排他"只……才"和量级"连……都"焦点副词结构如何影响句子的在线理解。结果发现,汉语焦点关联的对比语义信息能被快速加工;同时,量级焦点倾向与可能性低的事件连用,而排他焦点倾向与可能性高的事件连用。这点与英语表现一致。与英语的不一致性表现在:1)在焦点位置,汉语量级焦点句比排他焦点句加工困难,而英语中二者没有差异;2)汉语焦点与事件可能性不匹配的违例效应在量级焦点句中较早出现,而英语中的违例效应在排他焦点句中较早出现。本文认为差异来源于汉语焦点副词的复杂语义和结构特征。

The understanding of semantic focus involves understanding of a set of contrastive focus alternatives.Using eye tracking,the current work studied the processing of Chinese sentences containing exclusive(zhi…cai)and scalar(lian…dou)focus adverb phrases to examine how the two focus phrases impacted sentence understanding.Results suggested that focus-associated contrastive information was rapidly processed where scalar focus was processed more easily when followed by events of low likelihood,while exclusive focus was comprehended more easily with events of high likelihood.This applied both to Chinese and English parsers.However,they differed in the following:1)only Chinese scalar focus was found more difficult to process than the exclusive focus at the focus region;2)in terms of event likelihood incongruence,an early violation was observed with Chinese scalar focus sentences,while a similar effect was observed with English exclusive focus sentences.The differences could be attributed to the complex semantic and structural features of Chinese focus structures.