2. Grammatical voice and illocutionary meaning in an aural concept formation task.
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J. Raymond Reid
Abstract
A conjunctive concept formation experiment randomly presented, as aural stimuli, sentences which were systematically varied in Voice (active or passive), Mood (declarative or interrogative), Modality (affirmative or negative), tensel aspect, and lexical content. The target classes were the eight sentence types defined by all combinations of the first three syntactic variables. Compared to an earlier finding (Baker, Prideaux, & Derwing, 1973), aural processing was more difficult than visual, but higher education level facilitated concept acquisition, for males and females equally. The 64 undergraduate subjects tended to avoid syntactic analysis in depth, categorizing sentences on as cursory a basis as the task allowed. The simple, unequivocal syntactic signals of the illocutionary meanings associated with Mood and Modality were readily apparent, but the discrimination of Voice was complicated by multiply ambiguous syntactosemantic associations and lack of discourse context. Voice is thus not seen as a determinant of locution type, but as a context- and contentdependent realization of agent or object focus in transitive messages.
Abstract
A conjunctive concept formation experiment randomly presented, as aural stimuli, sentences which were systematically varied in Voice (active or passive), Mood (declarative or interrogative), Modality (affirmative or negative), tensel aspect, and lexical content. The target classes were the eight sentence types defined by all combinations of the first three syntactic variables. Compared to an earlier finding (Baker, Prideaux, & Derwing, 1973), aural processing was more difficult than visual, but higher education level facilitated concept acquisition, for males and females equally. The 64 undergraduate subjects tended to avoid syntactic analysis in depth, categorizing sentences on as cursory a basis as the task allowed. The simple, unequivocal syntactic signals of the illocutionary meanings associated with Mood and Modality were readily apparent, but the discrimination of Voice was complicated by multiply ambiguous syntactosemantic associations and lack of discourse context. Voice is thus not seen as a determinant of locution type, but as a context- and contentdependent realization of agent or object focus in transitive messages.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
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PART I: THEORETICAL BASES FOR EXPERIMENTAL LINGUISTICS (editorial introduction)
- 1. On paraphrase. 21
- 2. What is structural ambiguity? 35
- 3. On theories of focus. 55
- 4. Preliminaries to the experimental investigation of style in language. 65
- 5. English pluralization: A testing ground for rule evaluation. 81
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PART II: EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS (editorial introduction)
- 1. Grammatical properties of sentences as a basis for concept formation. 121
- 2. Grammatical voice and illocutionary meaning in an aural concept formation task. 141
- 3. Grammatical simplicity or performative efficiency? 157
- 4. A performative definition of sentence relatedness. 175
- 5. Paraphrase relationships among clefted sentences. 185
- 6. The recognition of ambiguity. 203
- 7. An experimental investigation of focus. 215
- 8. A discriminant function analysis of co-variation of a number of syntactic devices in five prose genres. 231
- 9. Rule learning and the English inflections (with special emphasis on the plural). 247
- 10. Perceptual dimensions of phonemic recognition. 273
- Epilogue 293
- Bibliography 309
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
-
PART I: THEORETICAL BASES FOR EXPERIMENTAL LINGUISTICS (editorial introduction)
- 1. On paraphrase. 21
- 2. What is structural ambiguity? 35
- 3. On theories of focus. 55
- 4. Preliminaries to the experimental investigation of style in language. 65
- 5. English pluralization: A testing ground for rule evaluation. 81
-
PART II: EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS (editorial introduction)
- 1. Grammatical properties of sentences as a basis for concept formation. 121
- 2. Grammatical voice and illocutionary meaning in an aural concept formation task. 141
- 3. Grammatical simplicity or performative efficiency? 157
- 4. A performative definition of sentence relatedness. 175
- 5. Paraphrase relationships among clefted sentences. 185
- 6. The recognition of ambiguity. 203
- 7. An experimental investigation of focus. 215
- 8. A discriminant function analysis of co-variation of a number of syntactic devices in five prose genres. 231
- 9. Rule learning and the English inflections (with special emphasis on the plural). 247
- 10. Perceptual dimensions of phonemic recognition. 273
- Epilogue 293
- Bibliography 309
