Chinese-Speaking Adults' Understanding of Argument Structure

Abstract

Syntactic constructions roughly correspond to sentence meanings. Jiang and Haryu (2014) found that Chinese children can associate subject-verb-object (SVO) constructions with causative events at age 2, but do not always map subject-verb (SV) constructions to noncausative events, even after reaching 5 years of age. The latter results may be attributed to the fact that Chinese allows argument-dropping. That is, an SV sentence in Chinese sometimes includes an intransitive verb, but other times includes a transitive verb with the object dropped. This paper investigated Chinese adults' knowledge of syntax-semantics correspondence. Experiment 1 found that Chinese adults did not always map SV sentences to noncausative events, while they almost always mapped SVO sentences to causative events. Experiment 2 found that they preferred to use SV and SVO constructions to describe noncausative and causative events, respectively. Chinese adults understand that causative and noncausative events should typically be described using transitive and intransitive constructions, respectively. However, when inferring to which event (causative or noncausative) the given sentence should be mapped, their performance seems to be regulated by actual SV sentence usage in Chinese.