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Semantic-role prominence is contingent on referent prominence in discourse: Experimental evidence from impersonals and passives in Polish
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Abstract:
The present paper reports two acceptability-rating experiments and a supporting corpus study for Polish that tested the acceptability and frequency of five verb classes (WATCH, SEE, HATE, KNOW, EXHIBIT), entailing different sets of agentivity features, in different syntactic constructions: a) the personal passive (e.g. zachód słońca był oglądany ‘the sunset was watched’), b) the impersonal -no/-to construction (e.g. oglądano zachód słońca ‘people/they/one watched the sunset’), and c) the personal active construction (e.g. niektórzy oglądali zachód słońca ‘some (people) watched the sunset’). We asked whether acceptability ratings would show identical acceptability clines across constructions affected by agentivity, as predicted from Dowty’s (1991) prototype account of semantic roles with feature accumulation as its central mechanism, or whether clines would vary depending on syntactic construction, as predicted from Himmelmann & Primus’ (2015) prominence account that uses feature weighting to describe role-related effects. In contrasting the applicability of these two accounts, we also investigated whether previous research findings from German replicate in Polish, thereby revealing cross-linguistic stability or variation. Our results show that the five verb classes yield different acceptability clines in all three Polish constructions and that the clines for Polish and German passives show cross-linguistic variation. This pattern cannot be explained by role prototypicality, so that the experiments provide further evidence for the prominence account of role-related effects in sentence interpretation. Moreover, our data suggest that experiencer verbs interact differently with the animacy of the subject referent, yielding different results for perception verbs (SEE), emotion verbs (HATE), and cognition verbs (KNOW).
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Keyword:
ddc:400; ddc:490
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URL: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5697
https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/55851/1/Kretzschmar%20%26%20Prenner%20%26%20Primus%20%26%20Buncic%202022%20Semantic-role%20prominence.pdf
https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/55851/
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Translation of the Polish “Slavistic Phonetic Alphabet” (AS) (Polska pisownia fonetyczna, Slawistyczny alfabet fonetyczny, Alfabet slawistyczny) into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
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Ideologies about the Serbo-Croatian language: Separateness vs. togetherness
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Die Vielfalt slavischer Sprachen und Varietäten (am Beispiel der Hochzeit zu Kana: Joh 2, 1–11)
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Proposal to include the letter ‘Old Polish O’ in ISO/IEC 10646 and The Unicode Standard
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Agent prominence and movement in Russian third person plural impersonals (“indefinite-personal sentences”)
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Foreign schriftdenken in ausbau languages: Luxembourgish and Rusyn orthographies in multiple language contact
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Distribution of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet in Serbian books
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Jan Hus und die Traditionslinien europäischer diakritischer Zeichen
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Agent prominence and movement in Russian third person plural impersonals (“indefinite-personal sentences”)
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