Evidence against lexicalist or configurational approaches to structural encoding in sentence production

Abstract

Psycholinguistic accounts of sentence production differ in the role they attribute to lexically represented information as, e.g. the argument structure of verbs. According to lexicalist approaches, argument structure information triggers the mapping of thematic roles onto syntactic functions. In contrast, the hypothesis of radical incrementality claims that conceptual factors are the main determinants of linguistic encoding. Models further differ in whether they assume one or two stages of grammatical encoding. Despite its ubiquity in parsing theory, a configurational account of sentence production has not been proposed explicitly (but see Shin & Christianson 2009). The finding that priming of the dative alternation (DA) is boosted by verb repetition (Pickering & Branigan 1998) is in line with a lexicalist account. Experiments on German showed structural priming between DA and benefactive alternation (BA) sentences, the latter including verbs of creation and preparation (Pappert & Pechmann 2013). Since DA and BA structures were both semantically and syntactically similar (cf. Hole 2014; Kittilä 2005; Pylkkänen 2008) the evidence was not conclusive. A recent experiment to be reported here combined DA primes and BA primes (the latter now without reference to an event of transfer, e.g. Der Schüler wischt dem Lehrer die Tafel / die Tafel für den Lehrer, ‘The pupil wipes *the teacher the blackboard / the blackboard for the teacher’) with DA targets. There was significant priming across structures. Even though DA and BA structures in this experiment are suggested to differ in semantics, argument structure and syntactic configuration, the priming effect was not modulated by alternation type. This outcome speaks against both a lexicalist and