Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation.

The grammatical relations of noun phrases in sentences are ordered in a hierarchy that is reflected in a wide array of linguistic phenomena. The hypothesis explored in this paper is that this hierarchy is related to the conceptual accessibility of the intended referents of noun phrases that commonly occur in particular relational roles, with relations higher in the hierarchy typically occupied by noun phrases representing more accessible concepts. An experiment on the formulation of sentences examined the relationship betweeen conceptual accessibility and grammatical relations for three levels in the hierarchy, the subject, direct object, and indirect object. There was a strong and systematic influence of conceptual accessibility on the surface syntactic structure of sentences. The attribution of this effect to grammatical role assignments, rather than to serial ordering mechanisms, was supported by the absence of an effect of conceptual accessibility on the order of nouns in conjunctive noun phrases. This pattern of results can be explained within current theories of sentence production. Converting thoughts into language requires that elements of the nonlinguistic conceptual system be mapped onto syntactic roles in sentences. In this paper we examine one aspect of this mapping process, arguing that an important factor in the assignment of conceptual elements to syntactic roles in the production of sentences is the ease of representing potential referents in thought, or their conceptual accessibility. An experiment provides evidence that conceptual accessibility is linked to a hierarchy of grammatical relations that influences sentence formulation. The nature of the cognitive and communicative features encoded in the *Portions of this paper are based on an undergraduate honors thesis submitted by the second author to the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. We thank Frank C. Keil and Michael H. Kelly for comments on the manuscript. Requests for reprints should be sent to Kathryn Bock, Department of Psychology, Psychology Research Building, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, U.S.A. OOlO-0277/8.5/$6.80 OElsevier Sequoia/Printed in The Netherlands 48 J. K. Bock and R. K. Warren syntax of language has been a major concern in recent psycholinguistics. Several such features have been found to correlate with the structural characteristics of sentences. This is particularly true for the surface subject relation or, more broadly, what comes first in an utterance (MacWhinney, 1977). The referents of surface subjects tend to be more animate (H.H. Clark, 1965; Harris, 1978), more concrete (H.H. Clark & Begun, 1971), more imageable (James, Thompson, & Baldwin, 1973), more definite (Grieve & Wales, 1973), more salient (Osgood & Bock, 1977), given rather than new information (Carroll, 1958), the object of the speaker’s interest (Tannenbaum & Williams, 1968), and the object of the speaker’s empathy (Ertel, 1977; Kuno & Kaburaki, 1977). Although the attention given to the subject relation can be justified by its centrality to the structure and content of sentences, any general theory must also account for such subsidiary roles as direct object, indirect object, oblique object, and object of comparison. The functional correlates of these grammatical relations and the differences among them have received less systematic investigation. Views of the kinds of distinctions that might underlie different grammatical relations fall into two intersecting sets. The first includes approaches which emphasize differences among the conceptual roles or communicative functions served by different linguistic devices (MacWhinney, in press). An example from this perspective is that expressions are more likely to be direct objects when they represent the recipients of actions, and subjects when they represent agents. The second set of views tends to regard different relations as manifestations of variations along some conceptual continuum. An example in this vein is that an expression is more likely to be the subject when it receives a greater amount of the speaker’s attention than another expression that serves as the direct object (MacWhinney, 1977). Another example is the Prague School’s construct of communicative dynamism, which is defined, roughly, as a continuum of informational redundancy that influences sentence structure (Firbas, 1965, 1966). It is the validity of views of this second sort that will concern us. The possible importance of a deep continuum related to the grammatical roles expressed in sentences is suggested by work in linguistics on grammatical relations (Cole & Sadock, 1977; Perlmutter, 1983). One of the most influential results of this work is reported by Keenan and Comrie (1977). They proposed a noun phrase hierarchy’ or relational hierarchy that ranks the ‘Keenan and Comrie call this hierarchy the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy, where accessibility is related to the relativizability of a noun phrase in a particular grammatical role. We will use the term accessibility with the sense it generally carries in cognitive psychology (Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966), having to do with the ease of retrieving information from memory. Conceptual accessibility and syntax 49 Table 1. Examples of relative clauses formed on noun phrase constituents representing three levels of the relational hierarchy. Grammatical relation Relative clause SUBJECT: THE BOY gave the book to the girl The boy who gave the book to the girl DIRECT OBJECT: The boy gave THE BOOK The book that the boy gave to the girl