Noun Accessibility and Syntactic Planning among Age Groups: A PDC Account

Soonhyuck Park. 2015. Noun Accessibility and Syntactic Planning among Age Groups: A PDC Account. Studies in British and American Language and Literature 116, 143-159. This paper explores how the semantic integration of animacy affects production frequencies of passive sentence in the relative clause structure among different age groups. Evidence indicates that Japanese speakers show the most prominent effect of head noun animacy on passive relative clauses, while English and Korean speakers do less. Moreover, English speakers generally produce more passive relatives than Korean speakers do regardless of animacy. The influence of semantic integration varies among age groups and that the semantically primed phrases or syntactic structure are more tightly linked at the conceptual level as speakers are more exposed to them. It turns out, therefore, that production choices clearly reflect cognitively motivated production demands such as noun accessibility as well as language specific constraints on passive structure choices.