The Misinterpretation of Passive Sentences

2 Abstract A fundamental task of the language comprehension system is to assign thematic roles to concepts in sentences and then maintain them. The comprehension system has access to two sources of information for thematic roles: one is the syntactic structure, and the other is information in long-term memory. In a sentence such as the dog was bitten by the man, the syntactic source specifies that the concept DOG is the patient and MAN is the agent; the schematic source provides the opposite role assignments, because it is far more plausible that a dog would bite a person than that a person would bite a dog. The studies reported here were motivated by two hypotheses: First, syntactic assignment of thematic roles is easier in canonical syntactic structures such as the active than in noncanonical structures such as the passive. Second, schematic information influences syntactically vulnerable thematic role assignments. If the syntactic and schematic sources are consistent, thematic assignments tend to stay bound to concepts. If they are inconsistent, syntactically based assignments will loosen, and misinterpretations are likely to occur. These hypotheses were explored in three experiments. In the first experiment, participants were presented active and passive sentences that were either plausible or implausible. Participants tend to label a sentence such as the dog was bitten by the man as grammatical. For the second experiment, the same sentences were presented aurally, and the participants' task was to identify the thematic roles in the sentence. Participants had difficulty keeping track of implausible roles in the passive, especially the agent. The third experiment showed that the active-cleft is no harder than an ordinary active sentence, suggesting that the frequency of the global syntactic form is not what determines whether a structure is canonical. Thus, the hypotheses of the study were supported. The results imply that the thematic roles assigned by language-specific mechanisms are quite fragile. The language comprehension system likely relies on nonlinguistic sources to reinforce these linguistically based interpretations—sources such as immediate context and long-term knowledge. 3 Syntactic Vulnerability and Thematic Misinterpretation Much of the research that has been conducted over the last twenty years or so on sentence comprehension has addressed a rather specific question: How is syntactic ambiguity resolved The question arises because often a string of words can be given more than one syntactic analysis. For example, in Mary put the book on the table onto the shelf, the …