A Study of Semantic Integration on Syntactic Choice in the Relative Clause Production: A Cross-Linguistic Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore how the semantic integration of animacy affects production frequencies of passive sentence in the relative clause structure among different languages. Specifically, it focused on examining the animacy effect and speaker's structure choice in relative clause production in Myanmar which is similar to Korean and Japanese with respect to the basic word order, but different from English. Animacy plays a strong role in determining the choice of passive structure in English. English speakers, for instance, show a tendency to produce more passive sentence with the animate head nouns in the relative clauses than inanimate head ones. In contrast, animacy plays a less prominent role in Myanmar, where more active structures were produced to varying degrees. Although the basic word order of English and Japanese are different, production preferences of object relative clauses in Japanese are almost the same as in English. But the structure choice for passive relative clause of Japanese and Korean, which have the same word orders are different. In general, word order appears not to influence relative clause structure choices. The speakers of languages mentioned in this paper produced passive relative clauses with different rates according to their different concepts of their mother languages. Structure choice in language production is influenced by prior utterances (Gennari and MacDonald 2009). The results of Myanmar language will be connected with PDC model by testing the comprehension ability of Myanmar speakers on sentence structures and by analysing Myanmar text.