Thematic Roles 1
Running head: THEMATIC ROLES LEAVE TRACES
Can thematic roles leave traces of their places?
Franklin Chang, Kathryn Bock, and Adele Goldberg
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Thematic Roles 2
Abstract
An important question in the study of language is the nature of the information that
speakers use to create syntactic structures. Research using structural priming has
suggested that the construction of syntactic frames may be insensitive to variations in
thematic roles within messages (Bock & Loebell, 1990; Bock, Loebell, & Morey, 1992).
Because these studies involved structural alternations whose syntax covaries with the
order of thematic roles, it is difficult to assess any independent contribution that role
information makes to the positioning of phrases. In this study, we primed the order of the
roles without changing the syntactic structure, and found that the order of the roles was
influenced by the priming manipulation. This implies that thematic roles or the features
that differentiate them are active within the mapping between messages and sentence
structures.
Thematic Roles 3
Can thematic roles leave traces of their places?
When we speak, we typically try to convey some notion or set of notions in a
sequence of words. Both of these tasks, conveying notions linguistically and developing
a sequence of words for doing so, have been argued to depend on their own specialized
representations (Garrett, 1988). The sequencing of words is constrained by syntactic
structure, which represents hierarchical and linear relationships among phrases. Such
structures can be seen as schemes for guiding the retrieval of words from memory (Bock,
1987).
On their own, structural constraints cannot insure that a sentence conveys the
intended meaning, and the violations of sentence meaning seen in word exchanges and
other speech errors indicate that in fact, structural integrity is not incompatible with
semantic perfidy. Rather, another set of processes must mediate between intended
messages and syntax. For example, the relationship between man and dog is different in
the sentences The man bit the dog and The dog bit the man. In the first sentence, the dog
did the biting and the man was bitten, while in the second sentence these roles are
reversed. Because the same sets of roles can occur in different structural and serial
positions (compare the active The man bit the dog with the passive The dog was bitten by
the man), languages (and the cognitive mechanisms for encoding them) must provide
some means for securing intended relationships among entities across variations in the
positions in which they occur. In theories of language production the maintenance of this
equation is the responsibility of functional processing (Garrett, 1988).
Thematic Roles 4
The nature of the functional equation that is formulated during production is
unknown, but an attractive hypothesis involves the construction (Goldberg, 1995). A
construction is a scheme that relates a set of thematic roles to a set of structural positions.
For example, in the sentence The man gave the girl the present, the agent is the man, the
patient is the present, and the goal is the girl. This sentences has three structural
positions, subject, object, and second object. The dative construction provides a mapping
to causes the agent to map to subject, the goal to map into direct object, and the patient to
map into second object position. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the role of
constructions in language production using the methodology of structural priming.
Structural priming builds on the phenomenon of structural repetition. Structural
repetition is seen in a tendency to reuse a previously produced sentence structure in a
new, otherwise unrelated utterance {Bock, 1986 #38}. For example, after producing a
sentence like The artist showed the police captain a sketch, speakers were more likely to
describe a subsequent picture using an analogous structure than if they had produced a
structurally different priming sentence like The artist showed a sketch to the police
captain. That is, having formulated one double-object structure, speakers were more
likely to use another double-object structure (e.g., The children are giving the teacher
flowers). Conversely, the production of a prepositional dative was associated with an
increased likelihood of using a prepositional dative later on (e.g., The children are giving
flowers to the teacher). Speakers thus tend to generalize structure from one sentence to
another. The existence of this generalization makes it possible to probe the nature of the
Thematic Roles 5
information that promotes it, exploring the kinds of relationships that support alternative
arrangements of constituents in sentences.
A constructional account of functional processing predicts that constituents that
play the same thematic roles in sentences should tend to occur in the same structural
roles. Standing in the way of this kind of account is evidence that structural repetition
does not hinge on the identity of thematic roles in prime and target sentences. Bock and
Loebell (1990) found that prepositional locatives (The wealthy widow drove the
Mercedes to the church) prime prepositional dative picture descriptions to the same
degree as prepositional dative primes (The wealthy widow gave the Mercedes to the
church) relative to double object controls (The wealthy widow gave the church the
Mercedes). The prepositional locative and the prepositional dative share a similar
structure (NP V NP PP), but they arguably differ in the event role of the prepositional
argument. In the prepositional locative, the prepositional phrase encodes the location of
the action, while in the dative it encodes the recipient of the action.
In another experiment, Bock and Loebell found even stronger evidence against a
purely thematic construal of structural repetition. Locatives like The 747 was landing by
the control tower primed passive utterances as much as passives like The 747 was alerted
by the control tower, relative to active prime controls like The 747 radioed the control
tower. The locatives and passives had similar syntactic structures (NP AUX V PP), but
the locatives had agents as subjects, while the passives had patients as subjects. These
results suggest that structural repetition does not demand overlap in the thematic roles of
prime and target sentences.
Thematic Roles 6
More puzzling from the standpoint of the constructional hypothesis is that role
overlap did not promote structural repetition: Locatives and passives were equally
effective primes, suggesting that the roles of the constituents did not influence their
positioning. Instead, Bock et al. (1992) proposed that basic conceptual features help to
regulate functional mapping. Bock et al. varied the animacy of the subjects of active and
passive sentences, and found that the presence of an animate subject in priming sentences
increased the tendency to make animate entities the subjects of target sentences. Because
this type of priming occurred over and above the general tendency to re-use the active or
passive structure of priming sentences, the implication is that thematic roles per se may
not participate in functional mapping. At the same time, elemental conceptual features
(like animacy, which is a dimension of event-role taxonomies that distinguish agents
from instruments, beneficiaries from goals, and so on) promoted similar positioning -- as
subjects -- of like constituents between primes and targets.
The paradox in these findings is that aspects of both sentence meaning (the
animacy of subjects) and sentence structure (active and passive form) appeared to be
susceptible to priming, when the functional mapping itself was not. This clashes with a
constructional account, where there is no dissociation between structures and the
meanings that they encode.
There is nonetheless a feature of existing research on structural repetition that
makes these results consistent with a constructional approach. Because English typically
confounds the structural position of a phrase with its thematic properties, it is difficult to
create changes to the thematic properties of a prime without corresponding changes to its
Thematic Roles 7
structural properties. For this reason, the correspondence between thematic roles and
syntactic functions in English has been manipulated in just one sentence position, leaving
the normal correlation in other positions mostly intact. For example, in Bock et al.
(1992), animacy and structure were manipulated independently in the priming sentences,
but not in the targets: In the targets, selection of an animate subject controlled the choice
of the sentence structure; alternatively, selection of a sentence structure controlled the
animacy of the subject. Such manipulations, relying on a single role variation to drive a
change in functional processing, may be insufficient to create consistent differences. In
contrast, the structural components of repetition have been supported by the entire gross
configuration of priming sentences.
Beginning with Pickering and Branigan (1998), more recent work has shown that
the magnitude of structural priming can increase substantially with overlap in semantic
and lexical content. Conversely, Bencini, Bock, and Goldberg (in preparation) replicated
Bock and Loebell’s locative/passive priming results, but showed that priming was
reduced when the preposition by was changed, suggesting that sharing of the preposition
can support passive priming. Finally, by creating overlap in two thematic roles, Hare and
Goldberg (1999) found evidence of thematic-role priming using the provide-with
construction and the double object construction. The provide-with construction (e.g. The
army provided the soldiers with blankets) has the same syntactic structure as the
prepositional dative (NP V NP PP), but the object argument is the recipient of the action
of the verb. This makes the structure similar to the double object construction, which
also puts the recipient directly after the verb. Hare and Goldberg found that speakers
Thematic Roles 8
tended to produce more double object expressions after provide-with sentences as well as
after double object sentences, relative to the production of prepositional datives. This
suggests that the order of thematic roles can be primed. However, because Hare and
Goldberg used the dative alternation, where the patient and recipient differ in animacy,
the results could be explained in the same terms as Bock et al. (1992) rather than in terms
of thematic roles proper.
To achieve a straightforward test of event role priming without the intrusion of
animacy or the confounding influence of structural repetition requires a different tactic.
What is needed are constructions in which the order of constituents varies without
corresponding changes in syntactic structure or the animacy of the arguments. One type
of sentence that fulfills these demands is the locative alternation {Levin, 1993 #356;
Anderson, 1971 #357; Rappaport, 1985 #355}, also called the spray-load alternation.
This alternation varies the order of the theme (the object that moves) and the location (the
place that is moved to), both of which are typically inanimate. For example, in The man
sprayed the wax on the car, wax is the theme and car is its final location. The alternative
structure puts the location before the theme, as in The man sprayed the car with the wax.
The structure itself is nonetheless the same, so priming of the structural configuration
should not differ. But if the order of the roles matters, then we should see theme-location
structures (with the theme role preceding the location role) priming other theme-location
structures more than location-theme structures (with the location role preceding the
theme role).
Thematic Roles 9
Since spray-load constructions are not easy to elicit reliably with picture
description, we needed another task in which structural repetition occurs. One such task
is Potter and Lombardi’s (1998) rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sentence
repetition paradigm. In this paradigm, participants simply read sentences that were
shown on a computer screen, one word at a time, at a fairly fast rate. They then
performed a distractor task before being asked to repeat the sentence aloud. Because of
the difficulty of explicitly remembering the surface forms of sentences, along with the
high speed of presentation and the intervening task, speakers sometimes changed the
syntactic structure of the sentences. Using this procedure, Potter and Lombardi (1998)
found a tendency to reuse previously produced structures, which they attributed to
structural priming.
Because this technique is relatively new, we wanted to replicate Potter and
Lombardi's (1998) results using materials that were previously employed in picture
description paradigms, to gain information about the relative strength of priming effects.
We therefore performed two experiments, one with the dative alternation and a second
with the spray-load alternation.
Two competing hypotheses were tested. The first, which we call the no-roles
hypothesis, claims that the message representations that support sentence production do
not individuate thematic roles as primitives, making it impossible to prime the roles
themselves. The second hypothesis, which we call the construction hypothesis, says that
event roles are a proper part of the messages that drive production mechanisms. The
hypotheses make the same predictions for the dative experiment, because either animacy
Thematic Roles 10
or thematic roles (the order of the patient and goal) could support priming. But in the
spray-load experiment, the no-roles hypothesis predicts no difference in priming between
the different orders of theme and location, while the construction hypothesis predicts just
such a difference.
Experiment 1: Dative Priming
The first study was designed to replicate work finding structural priming with
dative sentences using the RSVP production paradigm {Potter, 1998 #22}. We also
varied the preposition used in the target sentence to see if there were variations in the
likelihood of priming for datives with slightly different roles.
Method
Participants
Sixty-one students from the University of Illinois took part in the experiment,
receiving partial credit toward fulfillment of an introductory psychology course
requirement. A total of 48 students were included in the analyses. The remaining
participants were excluded because of experimenter errors (2), non-native English speech
(1), empty cells (2), or unusually low rates of codable prime and target repetitions (8).
Materials
There were 16 dative items. Each one contained noun phrases representing a
theme and goal after the verb, either as the direct object or the object of a prepositional
phrase (see Table 1 for examples). Two types of datives were used, transfer datives and
benefactive datives. Transfer datives have a verb that requires the preposition to in the
prepositional dative form. Benefactive datives have a verb that requires the preposition
Thematic Roles 11
for in the prepositional dative form. Both types of datives occurred in dative structures,
the prepositional structure and the double-object structure. Items were formed by pairing
a transfer and a benefactive dative. The prime occurred in both structures, but the target
dative was always in the double object form, to reduce the overall number of NP V NP
PP structures in the experiment as a whole. The pairings of prime and target were made
so as to minimize the lexical and semantic overlap between the members of each pair.
Table 1 illustrates one item, and the Appendix lists all of the experimental sentences.
In addition to the experimental items there were 288 filler sentences (32 sentences
from Experiment 2 act as fillers in this experiment). The fillers came from a variety of
constructions: Unaccusatives (The woman ran three miles a day), unergatives (The
politican coughed), there structures (There were free cookies yesterday), truncated
passives (The usual suspects were rounded up), clefts (It is strange to think that the
Beaver has grown up), copulas (The beautiful child was as good as gold), tough
movement structures (The anger of the crowd was hard to understand), locative inversion
structures (On the table were pancakes and coffee), that complements (The professor
believed that only half the class was enrolled), infinitival complements (The students
wanted to cancel class). The fillers were designed to avoid structures that might prime
prepositional phrases at the end of sentences, and to avoid lexical overlap with each other
and the target sentences.
Lists were assembled from the filler and experimental sentences so as to create
what appeared to be a series of 320 unrelated sentences. Embedded in the series were 16
sequences of two sentences derived from the experimental items. These constituted the
Thematic Roles 12
priming trials, each with a prime and target sentence. Eight versions of each prime-target
pair were created (2 orders x 2 structures x 2 verb types). There were two orders of the
sentences in an item. For each of these orders, the prime could occur in one of the two
structures. The target had either transitive or benefactive verbs, with the prime verb type
always mismatching that of the target.
To counterbalance experimental conditions, eight lists were created. One order of
the 16 priming trials (ordered in terms of the respective experimental items from which
the trials were created) was devised to rotate through the eight lists, with eight different
starting points within the rotation. Each list started with four items with prepositional
dative primes followed by a set of four items with double object primes, and this order
was repeated. The target verb type was alternated for each item. The fillers were
randomly ordered and this order was same regardless of the rotation of priming trials.
This served to distribute practice and fatigue effects across experimental items and
conditions while keeping their relative positions with respect to one another roughly the
same. The priming trials were separated by a total of 18 sentences (8 fillers, a prime and
target pair from Experiment 2., and another 8 fillers).
Procedure
Participants were tested individually, seated in front of a computer terminal in a
sound-attenuated room. Experimental trials were controlled by a Macintosh Quadra 800
running PsyScope software (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, Provost, 1993) with the
PsyScope button box. The monitor was an Apple Multiple Scan 17 Display (AK8
Thematic Roles 13
M2494) monitor. Participants viewed the screen from a distance of approximately 17
inches.
One sentence from the experimental list was presented on every trial. Figure 1
shows the sequence and timing of trial events. Each trial had three phases: a reading
phase, a number comparison phase, and a speaking phase. These phases unfolded
continuously, with the timing indicated in the figure, so that participants experienced an
uninterrupted series of stimulus and response events.
In the reading phase, participants silently read a sentence presented one word at a
time, which they were instructed to remember for later recall. This phase began with a
200 ms fixation prompt, which was a horizontal array of 5 asterisks in the center of the
screen. Then the words of the sentence were presented for 100 ms each in the center of
the screen.
Next came the number comparison phase, which was designed to obstruct
rehearsal of the to-be-remembered sentence and thereby decrease the likelihood of rote
recall. In this phase participants saw a horizontal array of five single-digit numbers for
533 ms, followed after 100 ms by a number written out as a word, which served as a
probe. It was displayed for 500 ms. A prompt for a yes or no response followed the
probe, and participants were supposed to indicate by a button press whether the
corresponding number had been in the list of digits. The prompt remained until the
participant pressed either the left (mapped to no) or the right (mapped to yes) on the
button box. Feedback about the response appeared for 500 ms (a happy face for a correct
response and a sad face for an incorrect response).
Thematic Roles 14
The final phase was speaking, when participants were to recall the sentence that
they had seen in the reading phase. This phase began immediately after number
comparison with a blank screen for 500 ms. Production was prompted with the word
“Repeat” centered on the screen, directing participants to produce the sentence that they
had just seen. The word “Repeat” stayed on the screen until participants pressed the
center button on the button box, to signal completion of the sentence.
Words and numbers were presented in 14-point Courier font. The sentence
productions were recorded on a Sony Digital Audio Tape Deck (DTC-ZE700) through a
Shure head-worn microphone (SM10A) amplified by an Optimus SA-155 Integrated
Stereo Amplifier.
From the participant's point of view, the sequences of sentences that constituted
primes and targets were not readily discriminable from the sequences of filler sentences.
The participants were not told about any of the differences in the sentences across the
various trials, or of potential relationships between successive trials. Objectively,
however, filler-sentence trials differed from prime and target trials during the numbercomparison phase. Filler trials had either yes or no answers, and on positive trials the tobe-verified number could appear anywhere in the array. Prime and target trials always
had yes answers and the to-be-verified numbers were always either the leftmost or
rightmost numbers in the number list, to decrease the occurrence of incorrect responses
on these trials.
Participants received the following instructions on the screen:
In this experiment, you will be doing two things. The first is reading and
remembering a sentence. To do this, you will read a sentence one word at a time,
Thematic Roles 15
and then you will be asked to repeat the sentence. The second task is a number
comparison task. In this task, you will see five numbers, like this
45291
Then the numbers will disappear, and you will be shown a number, like this
Two
You should decide whether this number was in the list of numbers you saw
before. Press the “yes” button if it was on this list, and the “no” button if it
wasn’t.
The hard part about this experiment is that you have to do the number task in the
middle of the sentence task. So you will read the sentence word by word, and
then you will do the number test, and then you will say the sentence when you see
the word “Repeat”. Here is how the experiment will proceed.
Press Yellow
The
couple
skated
gracefully.
############
45291
two
no yes
( press the “yes” button)
happy or sad face
(happy means correct, sad means incorrect)
Repeat
(say “the couple skated gracefully”)
Press yellow button to continue
So, you will press the yellow button to start. Then you will see the sentence
followed by ##########. Then you will see the list of numbers, and then the
number word. You will be prompted to press no or yes on the button box. Then
you will see a happy or sad face depending on whether you gave the right answer.
Finally, you will see the word Repeat and you should recall the sentence as best
you can. If you can’t remember the sentence exactly, try to put it into your own
words. To continue the experiment, you will press the yellow button.
If you have any questions, please ask the experimenter.
After the participants finished reading the instructions, the experimenter paraphrased
them and led the participant through the trial session from the instructions. The
participants then began the experiment, which led off with the 8 filler trials that preceded
the first experimental trial. Each experimental session took approximately 45 minutes.
Thematic Roles 16
Design. The data was analyzed with a 2x2 repeated measures ANOVAs, one with
participants as the replication factor (F1) and one with items as the replication factor
(F2). The two factors, prime structure and verb type, were within-subject and withinitem.
Scoring. The tapes of the experimental sessions were transcribed by editing a file
that contained a list of the prime and target sentences as the participants had originally
seen them. The sentences were edited so that they matched what the speakers had
produced on the tapes, including partially produced words, rephrasing, and pauses.
The transcribed responses were categorized with respect to the constituents of the
presented sentences and the structures of the utterances produced. The utterances could
be scored either as prepositional datives (The artist showed a sketch to the police captain)
or double object (The artist showed the police captain a sketch). Prepositional datives had
to fit the template “A verb B preposition C” and double objects the template “A verb C
B” where A was the presented subject noun phrase (e.g.. The artist), B was the noun
phrase representing the theme (e.g., the sketch), and C was the noun phrase representing
the goal. The same scoring procedures were applied to both prime and target responses.
Pauses and minor changes in tense, number, and articles were ignored. Other changes in
form (including content-word changes) caused responses to be excluded from the
analyses. This conservative coding was used in all analyses reported, but similar results
were achieved with a looser coding that allowed all alternating structures regardless of
their fidelity to the presented sentence.
Thematic Roles 17
A trial was considered valid if both the prime and targets were scored as a double
object or prepositional dative. Participants whose overall percentage of valid trials was
less than 50% were excluded. To insure that the participants were the same for both
experiment 1 and experiment 2, participants were also excluded if their percentage of
valid trials for experiment 2 was less than 50%. Eight participants were excluded
because they did not meet this criterion, and they were replaced. Overall, the participants
who met the criterion recalled 77% of the dative sentences in one of the two forms, with a
range of 50 –100 %. Two other participants yielded empty cells, and were also replaced.
Differences were considered significant when their associated probabilities were
less than or equal to .05.
Results
Table 2 shows the raw counts and the proportions of prepositional dative
structures produced out of all datives in each condition. Because the dative targets were
all in double object form, the overall number of prepositional datives is low. Analyses of
variance were carried out on both participants and items with prime type (prepositional
dative or double object dative) and verb type (transfer or benefactive verb) as withinsubject and within-item variables. Given a prepositional dative prime, participants were
significantly more likely to change the subsequent target to a prepositional dative
sentence (.06) than they were after a double object prime (.01), F1(1,47) = 12.11.
F2(1,15) = 7.35. Target verb type (transfer or benefactive) did not make a difference in
the number of prepositional datives produced (F1(1,47) = 0.13; F2(1,15) = 0.09). These
two effects also did not interact significantly (F1(1,47) = 0.20; F2(1,15) = 0.14).
Thematic Roles 18
Participants were accurate at the number comparison task, getting 92% correct on
datives and 91% for the fillers.
Discussion
Speakers were approximately 5% more likely to produce a prepositional dative
after a prepositional dative than after a double object prime. So, even though speakers
were engaged in a sentence memory task, where they were supposed to repeat a double
object sentence, they were also sensitive to the structure of the previously produced
sentence. Furthermore, we did not find reliably greater structural priming for either
target verb type, which further supports the view that structural repetition is not
dependent on lexical factors {Bock, 1989 #35}. These findings support the idea that
picture description and RSVP production tasks tap the same structural priming
phenomenon.
This replicates the findings of Potter and Lombardi (1998), although our priming
effects are smaller in magnitude than theirs. One possible reason for this is that the
structure examined in Experiment 2 was structurally similar to the prepositional dative.
Because the experiments were run at the same time, this similarity could have reduced
the novelty of the prepositional dative structure. If structural priming is a type of implicit
learning {Chang, 2000 #5}, then we might expect that the novelty of a structure within an
experiment to be important for the magnitude of priming.
Experiment 2: Spray-load Alternation
Thematic Roles 19
To test whether a representation that encodes the order of event roles can be
primed in the absence of differences in the syntactic structures, we examined whether
spray-load sentences would prime the same structure in other spray-load sentences.
Method
Participants and procedure
The same participants and procedures were used in experiments 1 and 2, because
the materials for both experiments were interleaved in the lists.
Materials
There were 16 spray-load alternation items. Each one contained noun phrases
representing a theme and location after the verb, either as the direct object or the object of
a prepositional phrase. Two types of spray-load items were used, theme-locative and
locative-theme. Theme-locatives place the theme in the object position, and the location
in a prepositional phrase with a directional preposition. Locative-themes place the
location in the object position, and the theme in a prepositional phrase with the
preposition with. Items were formed by pairing two of these locative sentences, so that
each item was made up of a pair of locatives in both of their structures. The pairing of
items was designed to minimize the semantic similarity in the actions. For example,
liquid-propulsion actions like “spray” and “splattered” were paired with non-liquidpropulsion actions like “jammed” or “engraved”. Table 3 illustrates one item in all four
conditions, and the Appendix lists all of the experimental sentences.
Eight versions of each prime-target pair were created (2 orders x 2 prime structure
x 2 target structure). There were two orders of the sentences in an item. For each of
Thematic Roles 20
these orders, the prime and targets could occur in both of the two structures. To
counterbalance experimental conditions, eight orders were created. One order of the 16
priming trials (ordered in terms of the respective experimental items from which the trials
were created) was devised to rotate through the eight lists, with eight different starting
points within the rotation. In each order, the prime structure alternated for each item.
The target structure alternated in an ABBA order. These orders were embedded into the
same lists as Experiment 1., separated by 8 fillers, before and after, from the next dative
trial.
Design
The data were analyzed with a 2x2 repeated measures ANOVAs, one with
participants as the replication factor (F1) and one with items as the replication factor
(F2). The two factors, prime structure and verb type, were within-subject and withinitem.
Scoring
The scoring of the responses followed the same procedure used in Experiment 1.
Transcribers edited a file that contained a list of prime and target sentences to make them
conform to what the speakers produced.
The transcribed responses were categorized with respect to the constituents of the
presented sentences and the structures of the utterances produced. The utterances could
be scored either as locative-themes (“The witch doctor stuck the doll with pins”) or
theme-locatives (“The witch doctor stuck pins into the doll”). Locative-themes had to fit
the template “A verb B with C” and theme-locatives the template “A verb C PREP B”,
Thematic Roles 21
where A was the presented subject noun phrase (e.g.. The witch doctor), B was the noun
phrase representing the theme (e.g., the pins), C was the noun phrase representing the
location (e.g., the doll), and PREP was a preposition other than with. The same scoring
procedure was applied to both prime and target responses. Pauses and minor changes in
tense, number, and articles were ignored. Other changes in form (including content-word
changes) caused responses to be excluded from the analyses. As in the dative
experiment, a looser coding yielded similar results. These participants recalled 77% of
the spray-load sentences in one of the two forms with a range of 50 –100 %.
Results
Table 4 shows the raw counts and proportions of locative-theme structures
produced out of all locatives in each condition. Analyses of variance were carried out on
both participants and items with prime type (theme-locative and locative-theme) and
target type (theme-locative and locative-theme) as within-subject and within-item
variables.
Participants displayed priming, being more likely to produce locative-theme
sentences after locative-theme primes (.415) than after theme-locative primes (.335),
F1(1,47) = 9.07, p < 0.005; F2(1,15) = 6.11, p < 0.03. There was also a main effect of
given target sentence type (F1(1,47) = 322.82; p < 0.0001; F2(1,15) = 717.28; p <
0.0001), where participants tended to use the target structure that they were given
(location-theme = .71, theme-location = 0.04). These two effects did not interact
significantly (F1(1,47) = 0.27; F2(1,15) = .002).
Thematic Roles 22
Participants were accurate at the number comparison task, getting 94% correct for
spray-load sentences.
Discussion
The results show that speakers tend to use the primed sentence structure when
they produced the target sentence. Since the primes differed in the order of roles, rather
than syntactic structure, these results support the idea that the order of roles can be
primed. This priming effect was relative to a general tendency to use the target structure
that they were given, as the main effect for target structure shows. These results also
suggest that lexical overlap did not increase spray-load priming. The theme-locative
structure uses a variety of prepositions to mark the locative role, while the locative-theme
structure uses only the preposition with. If the preposition with increased the tendency to
use the locative-theme structure in the target, we would expect that theme-locative targets
would change more to locative-themes than locative-theme targets would change to
theme-locatives. This would show up in the interaction between prime structure and
target structure. The fact that this interaction was not significant suggests that priming
was due primarily to the order of event roles, regardless of lexical overlap.
Discussion
The results from the two experiments were clear. The first experiment replicated
previous work showing that people tended to reuse previously produced structures, in the
RSVP paradigm, demonstrating structural priming with datives without lexical overlap.
The second experiment provided the critical test between two hypotheses about
functional processing – the no-roles and the construction hypotheses. We found that the
Thematic Roles 23
order of thematic roles in the prime elicited a similar ordering of those roles in the target.
This result cannot be explained by the no-roles account, and supports the construction
hypothesis.
The construction hypothesis suggests that priming of the order of thematic roles
could explain some of the priming results that have previously supported the view that
priming was purely syntactic. A constructional approach to production would say that
the elements of the message select a construction which is used to map roles into a phrase
order. In this processing theory, using a construction would increase its ability to be used
again, and that would be the basis for priming. Also, priming effects would transfer from
constructions to other related constructions. So for example, prepositional locative and
prepositional datives (Bock & Loebell, 1990) share the cause-motion construction even
though the verbs differ in terms of the participants that they provide. So priming of the
cause-motion construction allows priming to transfer from the prepositional locative
(with a transitive verb) to the dative construction. Since the magnitude of priming is the
same between the prepositional locative and the prepositional dative, we might need to
conclude that priming transfers between constructions without diminishment, or that
priming only effects the most abstract versions of the construction.
The one difficult result for the constructional account is the independence of
animacy and structural priming in results of Bock, Loebell, & Morey (1992).
Constructions are sensitive to the meanings that they are trying to convey, and therefore,
one should be more likely to select a construction if the appropriate semantic constraints
are present. But if this were true, then we should expect an interaction of animacy order
Thematic Roles 24
with structural priming, along the lines of the mediated mapping theory. Constructions
could account for the Bock, et al. (1992) results if active and passive constructions were
insensitive to the animacy of their arguments, and there was a second animacy
construction that would map animate arguments before inanimate arguments. Also, one
would need to have a selection algorithm that was sensitive to multiple constructions, in
order to get the independence of animacy and syntactic structure. While it is possible to
explain the results of Bock, et al. (1992) in constructional terms, this approach is
inconsistent with the spirit of construction grammar, with its tight linkages between
meaning and form.
Another approach to reconciling our spray-load results with previous work is to
elaborate ideas proposed in Bock, et al. (1992). They proposed that semantic features
(like animacy) directly influenced syntactic functions, without being mediated by
thematic roles. In this approach, thematic roles are not atomic entities, but rather they are
emergent categories that arise out of mapping of features to syntactic positions (Dowty,
1991). To see how this works, let us examine the production of the sentence “The man
gave the woman the book”. The message for this sentence would include a verb (GAVE)
and three participants, MAN, WOMAN, BOOK. Subject selection would depend on
several feature such as animacy, causality, motion (Dowty, 1991). The element in the
message that best matched the subject feature set (in this case the MAN) would get
selected as subject. Another set of features would be used for object selection, such as
affectedness, and the remaining element which best matched these features would be
selected.
Thematic Roles 25
How would features explain structural priming? In priming, links between
features and syntactic functions would be strengthen during the processing of the prime,
and that would lead to the greater use of that feature in the target. So animacy order
priming in Bock, et al. (1992) would be due to a strengthening of the tendency for
animate entities to be selected for subject. If syntactic structure depended on other
features like causality, then that would lead to independence of animacy-order and
structural priming. A similar featural approach could be used to explain our spray-load
results. The spray-load alternation involves an alternation in the order of the theme and
location. While the theme and location do not typically differ in animacy, they do differ
systematically in that themes tend to be liquids or mass objects (water, jam, hay) and
locations tend to be count nouns representing point locations. Spray-load priming might
involve priming of links between mass/count features and the object syntactic function.
In this case, thematic roles, as atomic entities, would not be necessary to explain the
results. This featural account of syntactic function assignment is consistent with
linguistic work on the spray-load construction suggesting that there is a meaning
difference between the two versions of the alternation, because different surface orders
will have different semantic feature associations, which naturally accounts for meaning
differences. The location-theme (“The man sprayed the wall with water”) is argued to
have a more “holistic” interpretation of the action on the location (i.e. the wall is totally
covered with water) than the theme-location version (“The man sprayed water on the
wall”). The featural approach naturally explains why the location-theme version is
interpreted as “holistic”, because object selection depends on affectedness of the object,
Thematic Roles 26
and so if the location is highly affected by the action (as in the “holistic” interpretation),
it is natural that it should be selected as the object (Dowty, 1991).
The featural approach to syntactic function assignment postulates that thematic
roles, as atomic entities, do not play an important role in production. But, structural
priming sometimes seems to involve the biasing of different arguments relative to the
other arguments. For example, in Bock & Loebell (1990), the infinitival transitive
(“Sally brought a book to study”) primed prepositional datives less significantly than the
prepositional dative (“Sally brought a book to Stella”), even though object selection
would arguably use the same features in each case (the object book is affected in both
cases by the action of the verb). These results make more sense if we think of the
prepositional dative prime sentences biasing the patient before goal, while the infinitival
transitive does not have another noun argument to bias the patient relative to. The
weakness of the featural approach is that it isolates priming to links between features and
syntactic functions, and does not have a mechanism for letting roles compete with each
other for sentence positions.
We found no evidence that the repetition of closed-class elements contributed to
priming, consistent with other results (Bock, 1989; Pickering & Branigan, 1998). While
Pickering & Branigan (1998) found that the verb repetition increased dative structural
priming, they also found that tense, aspect, and number of the verb had little effect, which
they argue further supports the view that priming occurs at a level abstracted from the
surface morphological/phonological information (although see Bencini, et al, in
preparation, for evidence that there is some influence of close class elements).
Thematic Roles 27
The finding that verb semantics can increase dative structural priming is consistent with
other work suggesting that verbs record the order of arguments that follow them
(Ferreira, 1996; Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997). The idea that verbs are
special sentence elements suggests another way to reconcile the featural and
constructional approaches. Since the strongest evidence against thematic roles occurs in
the transitive construction, subject selection is best captured by the strengthening of
feature and syntactic function links. But if verbs activate thematic roles, then object
selection might depend more on the relative ordering of thematic roles. This would
provide a unified account of dative and spray-load results, as well as explain the lack of
priming from infinitival transitive to prepositional datives. This account also might help
to explain why close class items can influence transitive priming (Bencini, Bock, &
Goldberg, in preparation), but does not influence arguments after the verb as in the sprayload study, and in dative structures.
The complexity of the structural priming literature is growing, requiring more
subtle and complex theoretical approaches. While the experiments in this paper do not
resolve the debate between the different theories, it provides important evidence for
ordering processes that cannot be explained by overlap in syntactic structure, lexical
items, and animacy. This result makes it clear that theories that posit that structural
priming influences only a single type of representation are no longer able to explain all of
the available data. Rather, we need theory of priming which relates meaning to syntactic
structures, and explains the conditions which different factors have their effects. While a
theory that involves multiple levels of representation is less parsimonious than an account
Thematic Roles 28
that makes use of a single level of representation, it is more consistent with work on the
mechanism of structural priming. Because structural priming lasts over the processing of
intervening sentences and/or time delays, Bock & Griffin (2000) argue that the
mechanism of structural priming is implicit language learning. Since language learning
involves learning the links between multiple levels of representation, it might not be
surprising that structural priming would also need a multi-level theory to explain the
changes that occur when we use our notions to create sentence sequences.
Thematic Roles 29
References
Anderson, S. R. (1971). On the role of deep structure in semantic interpretation.
Foundations of Language, 7, 387-396.
Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1982). Functionalist approaches to grammar. In E.
Wanner & L. R. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp.
173-218). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Bencini, G., Bock, K., & Goldberg, A. E. (in preparation).
Bock, J. K. (1982). Toward a cognitive psychology of syntax: Information processing
contributions to sentence formulation. Psychological Review, 89, 1-47.
Bock, J. K. (1986a). Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence
production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, &
Cognition, 12(4)
Bock, J. K. (1986b). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology,
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Bock, K. (1989). Closed-class immanence in sentence production. Cognition, 31(2), 163186.
Bock, K., & Loebell, H. (1990). Framing sentences. Cognition, 35(1), 1-39.
Bock, K., Loebell, H., & Morey, R. (1992). From conceptual roles to structural relations:
Bridging the syntactic cleft. Psychological Review, 99(1), 150-171.
Chang, F., Dell, G. S., Bock, K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). Structural priming as implicit
learning: A comparison of models of sentence production. Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research, 29(2), 217-229.
Thematic Roles 30
Ferreira, V. S. (1996). Is it better to give than to donate? Syntactic flexibility in language
production. Journal of Memory & Language, 35(5) Oct 1996.
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions : a construction grammar approach to argument
structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary investigation.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Osgood, C. E., & Bock, J. K. (1977). Salience and sentencing: Some production
principles. In S. Rosenberg (Ed.), Sentence Production: Developments in research
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Potter, M. C., & Lombardi, L. (1998). Syntactic priming in immediate recall of sentences.
Journal of Memory & Language, 38(3) Apr 1998.
Rappaport, M., & Levin, B. (1985). A study in lexical analysis: The locative alternation:
Bar Ilan University, Northwestern University.
Thematic Roles 31
Table 1
Example Dative Items:
Prime
Prepositional Dative (Benefactive)
An artist drew a sketch for the police captain.
Double Object (Benefactive)
An artist drew the police captain a sketch.
Prepositional Dative (Transfer)
An artist showed a sketch to the police captain.
Double Object (Transfer)
An artist showed the police captain a sketch.
Target
Transfer
A soldier offered his pal a cigarette.
Benefactive
A soldier saved his pal a cigarette.
Thematic Roles 32
Table 2: Counts and Proportions of Prepositional Dative Structures in Experiment 1
Prime
Prepositional Dative (Benefactive)
Double Object (Benefactive)
Prepositional Dative (Transfer)
Double Object (Transfer)
Target
Transfer
Transfer
Benefactive
Benefactive
Counts (Proportion)
10 (0.060)
1 (0.006)
10 (0.058)
3 (0.02)
Thematic Roles 33
Table 3: Example Spray-load Sentences in Experiment 2
Prime
Theme-locative
The maid rubbed polish onto the table.
Locative-theme
The maid rubbed the table with polish.
Theme-locative
The maid rubbed polish onto the table.
Locative-theme
The maid rubbed the table with polish.
Target
Theme-locative
The farmer heaped the straw onto
the wagon.
Locative-theme
The farmer heaped the wagon with
straw.
Thematic Roles 34
Table 4: Counts and Proportions of Locative-theme Structures
Prime
Locative-theme
Theme-locative
Locative-theme
Theme-locative
Target
Locative-theme
Locative-theme
Theme-locative
Theme-locative
Counts (Proportion)
121 (.791)
105 (.705)
12 (.076)
1 (.006)
Thematic Roles 35
Figure 1.
*****
200 msecs
The
100 msecs
politician
100 msecs
coughed
100 msecs
############
0 msecs
45291
533 msecs
100 msecs
two
500 msecs
No
Yes
500 msecs
(blank screen)
500 msecs
Repeat
Thematic Roles 36
Appendix:
Dative Items:
Each Cell holds two prime target pairs. The first pair has a
benefactive-dative prime followed by transfer-dative target. The second
pair has a transfer-dative prime and a benefactive-dative target.
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
An artist
A soldier
An artist
A soldier
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
The caterers fixed a
A carpenter took the
The caterers awarded
A carpenter made the
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
A cheerleader saved a seat for her friend.
Roger mailed Sally a portrait of his horse.
A cheerleader offered a seat to her friend.
Roger painted Sally a portrait of his horse.
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
The detective purchased a rawhide bone for his German
shepherd.
The chef passed the butler some Eggs Benedict.
The detective threw a rawhide bone to his German shepherd.
The chef cooked the butler some Eggs Benedict.
A woodcarver whittled a toy duck for the orphan.
The children mailed the company a picture.
A woodcarver promised a toy duck to the orphan.
The children painted the company a picture.
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
The
The
The
The
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
A secretary was baking a cake for her boss.
The librarian read the handicapped boy a short story.
A secretary was taking a cake to her boss.
The librarian wrote the handicapped boy a short story.
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
The manager was baking some peanut brittle for her
cousins.
An architect showed the company's president a design.
The manager was taking some peanut brittle to her cousins.
An architect drew the company's president a design.
The oil sheik bought a Rolls Royce for his mistress.
The teenager handed his brother a model ship.
The oil sheik gave a Rolls Royce to his mistress.
The teenager built his brother a model ship.
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
drew a sketch for the police captain.
offered his pal a cigarette.
showed a sketch to the police captain.
saved his pal a cigarette.
free banquet for the Lions Club.
preschooler a little birdhouse.
a free banquet to the Lions Club.
preschooler a little birdhouse.
grandmother sewed a quilt for her granddaughter.
eccentric old man passed Sally some chicken.
grandmother sent a quilt to her granddaughter.
eccentric old man cooked Sally some chicken.
The principal wrote a letter of recommendation for the
teacher.
The duchess was loaning the gardener a weedeater.
The principal read a letter of recommendation to the
teacher.
The duchess was buying the gardener a weedeater.
Thematic Roles 37
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
A
A
A
A
relative bought some flowers for the patient.
maid tossed the hotel guest a towel.
relative gave some flowers to the patient.
maid found the hotel guest a towel.
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
A rock star got some pure cocaine for his manager.
The restaurant awarded the customer a dinner.
A rock star sold some pure cocaine to his manager.
The restaurant fixed the customer a dinner.
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
A guard found some keys for
The stepfather promised his
A guard tossed some keys to
The stepfather whittled his
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
A
A
A
A
Benefactive Prime
Transfer Target
Transfer Prime
Benefactive Target
An inventor built a mousetrap for his elderly mother.
The woman was loaning her neighbor a ladder.
An inventor handed a mousetrap to his elderly mother.
The woman was buying her neighbor a ladder.
the prison warden.
stepson a boomerang.
the prison warden.
stepson a boomerang.
waitress made a tray of appetizers for the customers.
trapper sold the explorer some valuable furs.
waitress took a tray of appetizers to the customers.
trapper got the explorer some valuable furs.
Spray-load items:
Each sentence in each pair occurred as prime and target, in both themelocative and locative-theme structure.
The Naval officer draped the flag over the coffin.
Sheila sprinkled some cinnamon onto her toast.
The contractor plastered stucco onto the wall.
The biologist injected an antibiotic into the rat.
The performer packed all of his belongings into the suitcase.
The butcher wrapped newspaper around the fish.
The undertaker engraved the date onto the tombstone.
The chef sprayed oil onto the pan.
The short order cook spattered grease on his apron.
The deliveryman loaded boxes onto the truck.
The fashion model powdered rouge onto her cheeks.
The bus splashed water on the pedestrian.
The gardener planted daffodils on the hillside.
The game contestant crammed the dollar bills into his pockets.
The witch doctor stuck pins into the doll.
The home economics teacher brushed butter onto the turkey.
The housecleaner stacked dishes on the countertop.
Dad stuffed treats into the stockings.
The maid rubbed polish onto the table.
The farmer heaped straw onto the wagon.
The medic swabbed alcohol onto the wound.
The couple etched their initials into the tree.
The preschooler splattered paint onto the floor.
The policeman jammed the demonstrators into the paddy wagon.
Thematic Roles 38
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
prankster squirted disappearing ink onto his friend's shirt.
children tracked mud onto the carpet.
ranch hand branded a number onto the cow.
plane dusted insecticide over the crops.
technician smeared some gel onto the glass slide.
sailor tattooed a new design onto his arm.
storm showered hail onto the golf course.
new resident marked his house number on the gate.