Although a large number of studies have focused on various aspects of politeness,very little is known about how politeness intention is activated cognitively during verbal communication.The present study aims to explo...Although a large number of studies have focused on various aspects of politeness,very little is known about how politeness intention is activated cognitively during verbal communication.The present study aims to explore the cognitive mechanism of politeness intention processing,and how it is related to pragmatic failure during cross-cultural communication.Using 30 Chinese EFL university students who were instructed to finish a probe word judgment task with 96 virtual scenarios,the results indicate that within both mono-and cross-cultural contexts,the response time in the experimental scenarios was significantly slower than that of the filler scenarios.This suggests that politeness intention was activated while understanding the surface meaning of the conversation;however,the EFL learners could not completely avoid the negative transfer of their native politeness conventions when they were comprehending the conversational intention of the target language.Furthermore,no significant differences in response time were found between the groups with high and low English pragmatic competence,illustrating that transferring the pragmatic rules and principles into cross-cultural communication skills was more cognitively demanding.Overall,this study adds to the literature on politeness research and provides some implications for foreign language pragmatic instructions.展开更多
Verb-argument relation is a very important aspect of syntax-semantics interaction in sentence processing. Previous ERP （event related potentials） studies in this field concentrated on the relation between the verb a...Verb-argument relation is a very important aspect of syntax-semantics interaction in sentence processing. Previous ERP （event related potentials） studies in this field concentrated on the relation between the verb and its core arguments. The present study aims to reveal the ERP pattern of Chinese applied object structures （AOSs）, in which a peripheral argument is promoted to occupy the position of the patient object, as compared with the patient object structures （POSs）. The ERP data were collected when participants were asked to perform acceptability judgments about Chinese phrases. The result shows that, similar to the previous studies of number-of-argument violations, Chinese AOSs show a bilaterally distributed N400 effect. But different from all the previous studies of verb-argument relations, Chinese AOSs demonstrate a sustained anterior positivity （SAP）. This SAP, which is very rare in the studies related to complexity of argument structure operation, reflects the integration difficulty of the newly promoted arguments and the progressive nature of well-formedness checking in the processing of Chinese AOSs which is in accordance with the metonymic mechanism of non- patient objects in the relevant cognitive study. It shows that, in Chinese, which is a paratactic language, semantics （thematic roles） plays a more important role in the syntax-semantics interface than that in hypotactic languages.展开更多
文摘Although a large number of studies have focused on various aspects of politeness,very little is known about how politeness intention is activated cognitively during verbal communication.The present study aims to explore the cognitive mechanism of politeness intention processing,and how it is related to pragmatic failure during cross-cultural communication.Using 30 Chinese EFL university students who were instructed to finish a probe word judgment task with 96 virtual scenarios,the results indicate that within both mono-and cross-cultural contexts,the response time in the experimental scenarios was significantly slower than that of the filler scenarios.This suggests that politeness intention was activated while understanding the surface meaning of the conversation;however,the EFL learners could not completely avoid the negative transfer of their native politeness conventions when they were comprehending the conversational intention of the target language.Furthermore,no significant differences in response time were found between the groups with high and low English pragmatic competence,illustrating that transferring the pragmatic rules and principles into cross-cultural communication skills was more cognitively demanding.Overall,this study adds to the literature on politeness research and provides some implications for foreign language pragmatic instructions.
基金supported Beijing Social Science Fund Project(17YYB024)The Importation and Development of HighCaliber Talents Project (The Great Wall Scholar Program)of Beijing Municipal Institutions(CIT&TCD20150303)
文摘Verb-argument relation is a very important aspect of syntax-semantics interaction in sentence processing. Previous ERP （event related potentials） studies in this field concentrated on the relation between the verb and its core arguments. The present study aims to reveal the ERP pattern of Chinese applied object structures （AOSs）, in which a peripheral argument is promoted to occupy the position of the patient object, as compared with the patient object structures （POSs）. The ERP data were collected when participants were asked to perform acceptability judgments about Chinese phrases. The result shows that, similar to the previous studies of number-of-argument violations, Chinese AOSs show a bilaterally distributed N400 effect. But different from all the previous studies of verb-argument relations, Chinese AOSs demonstrate a sustained anterior positivity （SAP）. This SAP, which is very rare in the studies related to complexity of argument structure operation, reflects the integration difficulty of the newly promoted arguments and the progressive nature of well-formedness checking in the processing of Chinese AOSs which is in accordance with the metonymic mechanism of non- patient objects in the relevant cognitive study. It shows that, in Chinese, which is a paratactic language, semantics （thematic roles） plays a more important role in the syntax-semantics interface than that in hypotactic languages.
