Santesteban, M. 1, 2 , Pickering, M. . 2 , Branigan, H. 2 & Laka, I. 1
1 UPV-EHU University of the Basque Country
2 The University of Edinburgh
Priming effects have been found between unaccusative and passive syntactic structures in a nominative/accusative language such as English (Melinger, 2006), plausibly due to syntactic structure similarity. In an ergative language such as Basque, where unergative and unaccusative subjects receive different cases, we investigated whether (a) there is a priming effect from intransitive (unergative and unaccusative) to transitive structures; and (b) case-marking boosts syntactic priming.
Due to the absence of passive in Basque, we employed a transitive vs. intransitive structure alternation only found in psychological-verbs (psych-V). We predicted that due to syntactic structure similarities, unaccusatives should prime intransitive-psych-V structures more than unergatives (and actives). Additionally, if case marking played a role in structural priming, larger priming differences were expected between unaccusatives and unergatives in Basque than in English.
Basque native speakers described pictures representing change of psychological state actions. In Experiment 1 (n=16), descriptions were primed with transitive or intransitive-psych-V structures containing the same or a different psych-V than the target. We replicated effects of structural priming and lexical boost with more intransitive-psych-V structures produced after intransitive than transitive-psych-V primes, and larger priming effects following verb repetition. In Experiment 2 (n=24), descriptions were primed with unergative, unaccusative and transitive- or intransitive-psych-V structures containing different psych-Vs from the target. We replicated the priming effects of Experiment 1, but unaccusatives did not prime intransitive-psych-V structures more than unergatives. In Experiment 3, 24 English native speakers replicated Experiment 2\'s results while performing the task in English (active vs. passive alternation).
In sum, we showed evidence of structural priming and lexical boost effects in a new type of syntactic alternation: transitive/intransitive use of psychological-verbs in Basque. However, unaccusative or unergative structures did not prime the use of intransitive (or transitive) psychological-verb structures. Results suggest that case similarity is not enough to trigger syntactic priming.