Abstract
An event-related potential experiment was conducted in order to investigate readers’ response to violations in the hierarchical structure of functional categories in Japanese, an agglutinative language where functional heads like Negation (Neg) as well as Tense (Tns) are realized as suffixes. A left-lateralized negativity followed by a P600 was elicited for the anomaly of attaching a Neg morpheme outside a Tns-marking suffix (i.e., syntactic violation of the form *[[V − Tns] − Neg]), while only P600 was observed for the anomalous form with a purely morphological/morpho-phonological violation, i.e., a Neg morpheme attached to ren’yo form instead of Neg-selecting form. The findings suggest that the syntactic structure involving Tns and Neg in Japanese, realized within a word as a sequence of suffixes, is processed in a similar manner to the syntactic structures that are phrasally realized in well-studied European languages like English.
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Notes
The following abbreviations will be used in this paper including the Appendix: Acc (Accusative), Gen (Genitive), Neg (Negation), Prs (present/non-past tense), Tns (Tense), Top (Topic).
An influential model of sentence processing proposed by Friederici (2002) distinguishes ELAN (150–200 ms) and LAN (300–500 ms), claiming that the former reflects the stage of sentence processing including syntactic structure building, but the distinction between these two components is under debate (Friederici and Wiessenborn 2007). We do not go into this issue for space considerations.
The exact nature of the vowels -a in Neg-selecting form (2b) and -i in ren’yo form (2c) is under debate. Some researchers regard both of them as epenthetic vowels inserted in specific morphological contexts (Tagawa 2012), while others treat them differently: for instance, Nishiyama (2016) analyzes -ana in (2b) as a single morpheme, which is an allomorph of -na ‘Neg’, while -i in (2c) as an epenthetic vowel in some usages and as an independent morpheme (i.e., infinitive marker) in other usages.
In the alternative analysis mentioned in Note 3, where the Neg morpheme is realized as -ana rather than -na (Nishiyama 2016), the violation involves the wrong form (-ina) for the Neg suffix. This arguably would also constitute a morphological error.
A reviewer has pointed out that the parser could have parsed the examples like (3c) as two words rather than one, since the non-past morpheme -u generally marks the end of a word, in which case our syntactic violation is regarded to be realized at the phrasal level rather than the word level. While it is true that Tns in general marks the end of a word, Neg in the verbal domain must attach as a suffix to the preceding verb: thus there is good reason to believe that the parser treated examples like (3c) as one word. Furthermore, the stimuli were presented bunsetu-by-bunsetu, where each bunsetu consisted of one independent word (plus dependent functional elements like case markers) (see Procedures in the “Method” section), so that it is unlikely that the participants analyzed only (3c) as two independent words. These considerations, however, may not completely dispell the reviewer’s concern: one way to solve the problem is to design a similar experiment with oral presentation of stimuli, where the accent pattern can force “one word” interpretation of examples like (3c), which we would like to leave for a future study.
Strictly speaking, the illicit example (3c) may be interpreted to have two non-past tense morphemes, moyas-u-na-i (burn-Prs-Neg-Prs), so that the violation involves not merely the reversal of the hierarchical relation between Tns and Neg, but also doubling of Tns positions. This could also be considered as a case of syntactic violation in hierarchical structure involving functional categories.
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Funding
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Nos. 25284089, 16H03429) to Yoko Sugioka and Takane Ito.
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The research was approved by the Ethics Committee on Human Subjects Research of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo.
Appendix: Materials
Appendix: Materials
List of well-formed sentences with target stimuli. Illicit forms were constructed from these sentences according to the paradigm shown in (3).
Note: the glosses for the various sentence-final modal or verbal expressions, which include nominals that have lost their original meaning or light verb ’do’ and are not part of the target stimuli, have been somewhat simplified for expository purposes.
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Kobayashi, Y., Sugioka, Y. & Ito, T. ERP Responses to Violations in the Hierarchical Structure of Functional Categories in Japanese Verb Conjugation. J Psycholinguist Res 47, 215–240 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9525-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9525-8