关键词: 汉语, 主语关系从句, 宾语关系从句, 生命性效应, 题元角色

Abstract: Subject relative clauses (SRCs) and object relative clause (ORCs) are complex sentences with multiple embedded clauses in human language, so they are more useful materials for human to explore the inner relationships between syntax and semantic. As well, SRCs and ORCs are effective materials for exploring human cognitive mechanism. Many studies in Indo-European language literature have shown that SRCs were easier to process than ORCs at regions of the internal-relative-clause and the matrix verb. What’s more, the differences in processing SRCs and ORCs were mediated by the animacy configuration of the head noun phrases in the internal-relative clause and the matrix. There are few studies conducted to explore the processing difficulties of Chinese RCs, although these phenomena are prevalent in Chinese text. Moreover, very few studies aiming to explore the animacy effect of the head noun phrases due to the paucity of the field. This paper aimed to study the processing difficulties of Chinese SRCs or ORCs with different animacy configuration by eye-movement tracking paradigm. According to the syntactic locality dependency accounts, SRCs would be more difficulty to process than ORCs in Chinese at regions of the internal-relative-clause, the head noun phrases and the head verbs in matrix, for the syntactic distance between the filler and the gap in SRCs was longer than that in ORCs. While according to the thematic fit accounts, the difficulties in processing Chinese RCs would vary with the animacy configuration of the head noun phrase in the internal-relative-clause and the matrix. What’s more, the differences in RTs were mainly found at regions of the head noun phrases and the verb in matrix, in which arguments were constructed and semantics were integrated. A 2×2 within subjects design was adopted with independent variables of reaction time (RT) and mean accuracy on comprehension questions. The results showed that the animacy configuration of the head nouns indeed had effects on Chinese relative clause processing. Specifically, ORCs with animate-inanimate configuration were easier to process at the first two words, the relativizer (de), the head nouns, and the head verbs than SRCs, but no differences in processing ease were found between SRCs and ORCs at the head nouns and the head verbs under inanimate-animate configuration, which were partially consistent with predictions of the thematic fit accounts. Another aim of this paper was to explore the time course of the animacy effect of the head nouns in Chinese relative clause processing by eye-movement tracking paradigm based on the first-fixation time, the first-pass time, the regression path duration, the total time and the skipping rate. No differences were found in early eye-movements measures, such as the first-fixation time, the first-pass time, but significant differences were found in later eye-movements, such as the regression path duration, the total time. Which were different from findings from Indo-European language literature. The results showed that the animacy effect mainly took place in the late time course in processing Chinese relative clause, when retrieving semantic and constructing thematic relationships, which indicated some specials in processing complex sentences in Chinese.

Key words: Chinese, subject relative clause, object relative clause, animacy effect, thematic role