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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Definition of Syntactic Priming
Bock in 1986 came up with a definition of syntactic priming which has becomethe most accepted one in the field of priming studies. It states that syntactic priming isthe tendency for speakers “to repeat the syntactic forms of sentences in subsequentutterances that are minimally related in lexical, conceptual, or discourse content” (p.378). This means that if a speaker hears an utterance in a passive construction, like“My wallet was stolen on the railway station yesterday”, the speaker is more likely toreuse the same construction later in his or her speech. What is worth noting is that thelatter utterance may be completely unrelated to the former in meaning, like “I was metby the receptionist at the front desk”. Therefore, this phenomenon shows that speakersrepeat previously heard, seen, or comprehended grammatical forms in their own subsequent utterances, which more or less reveals how syntactic structure isrepresented and processed in speakers of a certain language.
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2.2 Methodologies and Techniques Used in Syntactic Priming
Since the discovery of syntactic priming, the bulk of studies on this issue, mostlyrelated to observational and experimental approaches, have been conducted to furtherexplore this area. The evidence supporting the syntactic priming effects has beengathered with the use of various experimental methodologies and techniques. Thereare four commonly accepted classic methodologies, i.e. (a) spoken picture description,(b) written sentence completion, (c) sentence recall, and (d) confederate scripting. Spoken picture description was employed by Bock and Loebell in 1986. Theexperiments took advantage of the fact that English language is syntactically quiteflexible, which means that similar message content could be conveyed throughalternative structures. Under the guidance of this technique, participants first hear orread a priming sentence, and then they are asked to describe a target picture. Thepicture has no semantic relationship with the previously heard or read sentence, andthe researchers intend to find out what sentence structure the participants prefer touse.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Underpinnings.......21
3.1 Models on Language Production ........21
3.1.1 Bock and Levelt’s Spreading Activation Model......21
3.1.2 The Meme Theory.........24
3.2 Syntactic Representation: What is Shared between L1 and L2? ........24
3.3 Sentence Structure ......25
Chapter Four Research and Discussion .....32
4.1 Research Methodology .....32
4.1.1 Corpora Selected.....32
4.2 Research One —— Transitive Utterances ......38
4.2.1 General Investigation on ICE-GB.........39
4.2.2 General Investigation on Sub-SECCL2.0 .........40
4.2.3 Comparison between Native and Bilingual Language Data .....42
4.2.4 Research Summary .......44
4.3 Research Two——The Dative Alternation .....45
4.3.1 General Investigation on ICE-GB.........45
4.3.2 General Investigation on sub-SECCL2.0....48
4.3.3 Verb-Specific Investigation.......51
4.3.4 Research Summary .......54
4.4 Discussion .......55
4.5 Summary .........60
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