The Technique of Data Collecting and Data Analysis

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CHAPTER II THE THEORETICAL DESCRIPTION

A. Previous Researches

Some previous studies about thematic roles have been investigated by several researchers in different perspectives and resources which are taken from narrative, argumentative or persuasive text. First, An important question in the study of language production is the nature of the semantics information that speakers use to create syntactic structures. A common answer to this question assumes that thematic roles help to mediate the mapping from messages to syntax. However, research using structural priming has suggested that the construction of syntactic frames may be insensitive to variations in thematic roles within messages. Because these studies involved structural alternations whose syntax covaries with the order of thematic roles, it is difficult to assess any independent contribution that role information may make to the positioning of phrases. In this study, we primed the order of the roles without changingthe syntactic structure of the sentences produced, and found that the order of the roleswas influenced by the priming manipulation. This implies that thematic roles or the features that differentiate them are active within the mapping between messages and sentence structures. 9 9 Franklin Chang, et al., “Thematic Roles Leave Traces” accessed date: February 24, 2015, retrievedfrom:http:www.princeton.edu~adelefinalfranklincognition.pdf. Second, considering the developments concerning semantic and syntactic approaches within the framework of Generative Grammar have intended, in this study, to analyze the thematic and syntactic structures of sentences in Turkish, an to find out the principles underlying to correspondence between the two domains, and then to observe how the findings can shed light on certain aspects of Turkish Grammar satisfactorily. 10 Third, The syntactic realization of a verb‟s arguments is constrained by the role that the argument plays in the meaning of the verb. In most linguistic frameworks, these constraints are captured by mappings between syntactic functions and thematic roles. Such mappings clearly shape our interpretation of novel verbs. But there is controversy about when these mappings develop and whether they are employed in the processing of utterances containing known verbs. We explored these issues using the visual-world paradigm and structural priming during comprehension in 4-year-old children. In experiment I, we found robust priming of dative constructions. This priming persisted when animacy cues were put in competition with argument structure, indicating that the locus of priming was either in syntax or in the mapping between thematic roles and syntactic functions. Experiment II demonstrated priming from locatives to datives indicating that this priming was not purely syntactic. Together these experiments provide evidence for the use of thematic mappings during sentence processing, independent of confounding syntactic or conceptual factors. We discuss the 10 Nafi, Yalcin, “The Analysis of Correlations between Thematic Roles and Syntactic Relations in Turkish Sentences” Hacettepe University , Department of English Linguistics, 2002 acessed date:February 24, 2015, retrieved from:http:linguistlist.orgpubsdissbrowse-diss- action.cfm?DissID=14281.