Chapter 2 Literature Review
3.1 Method
3.1.2 Design
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3.1 Method
3.1.1 Participants
Twenty-four university students, including 19 females and 5 males (averaging age is 21.6 years old, ranging from 18 to 27) were paid to participate in the experiment. The participants were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. They were naïve to the purpose of the experiment and had not received linguistics training. All had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
3.1.2 Design
Four conditions were constituted based on two variables—relative clause type (SRC versus ORC) and plausibility (reversible versus irreversible argument-verb relation), as shown from (20a) to (20d). Subject relative clauses (SRCs) and object relative clauses (ORCs) were created by changing the order of the head noun (N2) as well as the noun (N1) and the verb (V1) in the relative clauses, given that the verbs in the relative clauses were transitive verbs, which require an object as well as a subject.
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(20) Examples of the four conditions in Experiment 1:
a. Subject relative clause with reversible argument-verb relation
因觸景傷情，|抱住|孤兒|的|牧師|很|懷念|祖母|，忍不住掉下淚來。
Yin chujingshangqing, because sad at the sight of the scene
baozhu | guer | de | mushi | hen | huainian | zumu |,
Hug orphan DE pastor very miss grandmother
V1 N1 REL N2 V2 N3
renbuzhu diaoxialeilai.
cannot help but shed tears
‘Because turning sad at the sight of the scene, the pastor who hugged the orphan missed his grandmother very much, and he could not help but shed tears.’
b. Object relative clause with reversible argument-verb relation
因觸景傷情，|牧師|抱住|的|孤兒|很|懷念|祖母|，忍不住掉下淚來。
Yin chujingshangqing, because sad at the sight of the scene
mushi | baozhu | de | guer | hen | huainian | zumu |,
pastor hug DE orphan very miss grandmother
N1 V1 REL N2 V2 N3
renbuzhu diaoxialeilai.
cannot help but shed tears
‘Because turning sad at the sight of the scene, the orphan who the pastor hugged missed his grandmother very much, and he could not help but shed tears.’
c. Subject relative clause with irreversible argument-verb relation
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because sad at the sight of the sceneryshourong | guer | de | mushi | hen | huainian | zumu |, accommodate orphan DE pastor very miss grandmother
V1 N1 REL N2 V2 N3
renbuzhu diaoxialeilai.
cannot help but shed tears
‘Because turning sad at the sight of the scene, the pastor who
accommodated the orphan missed his grandmother very much, and he could not help but shed tears.’
d. Object relative clause with irreversible argument-verb relation
因觸景傷情，|牧師|收容|的|孤兒|很|懷念|祖母|，忍不住掉下淚來。
Yin chujingshangqing, because sad at the sight of the scenery
mushi | shourong | de | guer | hen | huainian | zumu |, pastor accommodate DE orphan Very miss grandmother
N1 V1 REL N2 V2 N3
renbuzhu diaoxialeilai.
cannot help but shed tears
‘Because turning sad at the sight of the scene, the orphan who the pastor accommodated missed his grandmother very much, and he could not help but shed tears.’
By doing so, the SRC and ORC constructed as a pair would share the same proposition in the relative clause; that is, the meaning of the relative clause in both SRC and ORC was the same, as shown in (20a) and (20b), as a pair, and (20c) and
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(20d), as the other pair. Take the first pair as example, the meaning of relative clause part is “the pastor hugged the orphan” ( 牧師|抱住|孤兒 mushi|baozhu|guer) in both SRC (22a) and ORC (22b). The difference between SRC and ORC was that the head nouns (N2) were different. Therefore, the subjects of the main clauses were different.
For instance, the main clause meaning in (22a) is “the pastor missed Grandmother very much” (牧師|很|懷念|祖母 mushi|hen|huainian|zumu) while the counterpart in (22b) means “the orphan missed Grandmother very much” (孤兒|很|懷念|祖母
guer|hen|huainian|zumu).
As for plausibility, the argument-verb relations of the relative clauses were designed to be reversible versus irreversible. To be specific, the two critical noun phrases and the transitive verb in the relative clause formed an argument-verb relation in which one critical noun phrase is the agent of the verb and the other the patient. In the reversible conditions, both of the critical noun phrases were a plausible agent of the action described by the verb in the relative clause. For example, it is plausible for both mushi ‘pastor’ and guer ‘orphan’ to baozhu ‘hug’ each other. On the contrary, only one of the critical noun phrases was a plausible agent of the action in the relative clauses in the irreversible conditions. For example, it is plausible for mushi ‘pastor’ to
shourong ‘accommodate’ or ‘take in’ guer ‘orphan’, but not vice versa. Note that, in
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reality, though some more peculiar situations, such as “the orphan accommodates, or takes in, the pastor”, the plausibility is very low. (See plausibility norming, 3.1.4)
Note that this design differed from Traxler et al. (2002) in the degree of comparability between the reversible and irreversible conditions. The reversible versus irreversible conditions were manipulated solely with the change of the verb in the relative clause in our design, while Traxler et al. (2002) separated the two conditions into two experiments with 2 uncontrolled sets of materials, though the participants were drawn from the same group of people. Moreover, the word length and word frequency of were controlled and the word class ambiguity avoided as well as possible in our material generation.