{"title":"Effects of verb and construction frequency in sentence comprehension","authors":"Hyunwoo Kim, Gyu-Ho Shin","doi":"10.1075/fol.22028.kim","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Two theoretical viewpoints provide different explanations about how people extract statistical regularities from\n input to assess the felicity of verb usage in a sentence. The lexical approach emphasizes the role of verb frequency in\n determining a verb’s distributional bias within a sentence, whereas the entrenchment hypothesis highlights the conjoined roles of the frequency information from both a verb and an argument structure construction. The present study tests these accounts by\n investigating Korean speakers’ interpretation of two dative patterns in Korean (Dative–Accusative and Accusative–Accusative).\n Through the analysis of a large-scale corpus, we calculated the frequency of each dative pattern as well as the frequency of\n dative verbs occurring therein. Using this information, we conducted an acceptability judgment task with Korean speakers by\n manipulating the dative type and the verb frequency. The results showed that the speakers’ acceptability rating behavior was\n affected by the interaction between the verb and construction frequency such that highly entrenched verb–construction\n combinations were evaluated to be more acceptable. Our finding supports the entrenchment hypothesis that emphasizes the conjoined\n roles of usage frequency of verbs and constructions in sentence comprehension.","PeriodicalId":44232,"journal":{"name":"Functions of Language","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Functions of Language","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.22028.kim","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Two theoretical viewpoints provide different explanations about how people extract statistical regularities from
input to assess the felicity of verb usage in a sentence. The lexical approach emphasizes the role of verb frequency in
determining a verb’s distributional bias within a sentence, whereas the entrenchment hypothesis highlights the conjoined roles of the frequency information from both a verb and an argument structure construction. The present study tests these accounts by
investigating Korean speakers’ interpretation of two dative patterns in Korean (Dative–Accusative and Accusative–Accusative).
Through the analysis of a large-scale corpus, we calculated the frequency of each dative pattern as well as the frequency of
dative verbs occurring therein. Using this information, we conducted an acceptability judgment task with Korean speakers by
manipulating the dative type and the verb frequency. The results showed that the speakers’ acceptability rating behavior was
affected by the interaction between the verb and construction frequency such that highly entrenched verb–construction
combinations were evaluated to be more acceptable. Our finding supports the entrenchment hypothesis that emphasizes the conjoined
roles of usage frequency of verbs and constructions in sentence comprehension.
期刊介绍:
Functions of Language is an international journal of linguistics which explores the functionalist perspective on the organisation and use of natural language. It encourages the interplay of theory and description, and provides space for the detailed analysis, qualitative or quantitative, of linguistic data from a broad range of languages. Its scope is broad, covering such matters as prosodic phenomena in phonology, the clause in its communicative context, and regularities of pragmatics, conversation and discourse, as well as the interaction between the various levels of analysis. The overall purpose is to contribute to our understanding of how the use of languages in speech and writing has impacted, and continues to impact, upon the structure of those languages.