上下文對處理主要動詞／省略關係子句句式歧義的限制

Abstract

The horse raced past the barn fell 是一句暫時性模稜兩可的英文句子。原因在於動詞raced 可暫時解釋為主要子句裡面的主要動詞，亦或是省略關係子句裡的動詞。本研究透過完成句子的方式收集資料，結果發現臺灣英語學習者並不能像英語人士一樣有效地利用上文中指涉對象的數目去處理模稜兩可的名詞／動詞片段。這個片段就是造成帶有主動詞／省略關係子句動詞的花園路徑句子的主要部分。本文將以上下文為本的模式理論討論這個結果。

The horse raced past the barn fell is a syntactically temporary ambiguous sentence because the verb “raced” can temporarily be analyzed as a main verb (MV) in a main clause or as a past participle in an embedded reduced relative clause (RRC). Using a sentence completion task, the present study found that Taiwanese learners of English, unlike native English speakers, could not effectively use referential contexts to process ambiguous noun/verb fragments, which mainly lead to MV/ RRC ambiguities. As a result, differences in RRC sentence completions between 1-NP-Referent contexts and 2-NP-Referent contexts took place for native speakers, but not for Taiwanese learners of English. The findings are discussed in terms of the discourse-based model.