n.The present study aims to observe syntactic priming based on corpus datacollection and analysis. It will first review previous studies using both experimentaland corpus-based approaches, monolinguals and bilinguals. Then it will go on to builda theoretical underpinning for the study, and analyzing the data collected from thecorpus. All the data come from Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals’ impromptuEnglish dialogues, which will reflect second language English to English syntacticpriming. By studying the prime and target sentences, it further looks into issues suchas what the priming phenomenon tells us about syntactic representation in Chinesebilinguals, which is important for understanding syntactic processing in their languageproduction, and also the characteristics and how to improve syntactic representation,to help Chinese learners’ second language ability. Therefore, by re-investigating intothe issue from a corpus-based perspective and by employing a with-in secondlanguage syntactic priming paradigm, the thesis intends to find answers to thefollowing questions:(1) Does a second language syntactic priming effect exist among ChineseEnglish language learners’ natural speech?(2) Do the syntactic structures in a speaker’s first language have anyinfluence on their second language production?(3) Is there any continuity between processing one’s first language andsecond language production in typologically different languages?(4) Are there syntactic priming effects when a sentence is shown in differentpriming types?(5) What is the relationship, similarities and differences, between acorpus-based study and an experimental approach to syntactic priming?By answering these questions, this thesis hopes to shed a little light on the modelof syntactic representation and processing in bilingual speakers, while these pieces ofevidence can, at the same time, be of some help towards improving second languageacquisition.
Chapter Two Literature Review
Experiments on syntactic priming have been widely conducted and discussedsince the effect was discovered, recently also within corpus-based approaches. Untilnow, research in this field has focused both on monolingual and bilingual groups ofspeakers. Some important studies from home and abroad are introduced andsummarized in this chapter.
2.1 Definition of Syntactic Priming
In 1982, Levelt and Kelter found that merchants in the Netherlands tended toformulate their answers to questions such that the syntactic structures of their answerswere identical to that of the questions. For example:(1) a. At what time does your shop close?b. At five o’clock.(2) a. What time does your shop close?b. Five o’clock.Notice that the Dutch equivalents of the questions in (1)a and (2)a, tend to trigger(1)b and (2)b as answers, respectively. The b sentences echo the syntactic structure ofthe question’s they are answers to.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 ownsubsequent utterances, which more or le
