영어 수동문 연구: 유생성 효과에 대한 PDC이론적 접근

Abstract

English passives yield more complex structure than actives, but they still show a high frequency of use. This is caused by many factors. Depending on what is put before a verb between an agent and a theme, the verb form is changed and that is the result of the noun sequence. That is to say, the relation of a subject and a verb is what distinguishes between active and passive. Hence noun classification can be a factor for it. There are many characteristics to classify the nouns such as case, gender, and animacy. Among these, an animacy effect on syntactic and semantic roles has been a topic for many linguists. This study shows how an animacy effect plays in Korean speakers comprehension of English passives from the production, distribution, and comprehension(PDC) approach. According to PDC, it is hypothesized that the language comprehension system is related with people's learning about the statistics of their language. The statistical learning reflects comprehension biases. When people interpret a sentence, the initial interpretation of an ambiguous sentence is strongly determined by distributional information. This distribution pattern arises from pressures on the production system. This study explores two perspectives. One is to verify how comprehension biases in Korean affect understanding English passives regarding animacy effects based on PDC. The other is to display other factors which determine sentence structure. The word choice and order are determined by the verb type rather than animacy effects. In order to show these based on PDC, three experiments were held: preference survey, reading time measurement, and corpus analysis.