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Based on this, this thesis intends to explore the priming of ORC under three different animacy conditions altogether: inanimate-animate (e.g., Here is the accident that the child witnessed) vs. animate-inanimate (e.g., Here is the child that the accident terrified) vs. animate-animate (e.g., Here is the child that the babysitter liked). This is due to previous research on sentence comprehension using the self-paced reading paradigm and the eye-tracking paradigm have shown that the animacy of two critical nouns significantly affects the comprehension of ORC. ORC under inanimate-animate condition is the easiest processing type, but ORC under animate-inanimate condition is the most difficult type to process. Although Wei and Jin (2020) have proven the syntactic priming effect of ORC under animate-animate condition (e.g., Here is the child that the babysitter liked), this result cannot represent the priming of ORC under the other two animacy conditions: inanimate-animate (e.g., Here is the accident that the child witnessed) vs. animate-inanimate (e.g., Here is the child that the accident terrified). Thus, this thesis intends to explore the priming of ORC under three animacy conditions altogether: inanimate-animate vs. animate-inanimate vs. animate-animate. But ORC under inanimate-inanimate condition (e.g., Here is the ground that the rain washed) isn’t concluded in this thesis, which is an uncommon use in English daily language and hasn’t been studied by other researchers in the field of ORC. 

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Review on Syntactic Priming

2.1.1 Introduction to Syntactic Priming

It appears that the term “priming” was first used by psychologists Feldman and Weld (1939), who defined it as a state of intentional preparedness for perception. Later linguist Lashley (1951) used it to describe an internal activation or readiness of linguistic elements in speech production (e.g., preparing a structural configuration of an utterance before producing it). However, the term “priming” used today did not become mainstream until Segal and Cofer (1960) published a study and demonstrated that language users are more likely to reuse the words that they have been exposed to before performing the subsequent task. This phenomenon was defined as priming, including the priming of words, phrases, rhetoric, and syntactic structures, which attracted a lot of attention. Syntactic priming, also known as syntactic persistence or structural priming, was first put forward by Bock. Bock (1986) investigated the DO structure and PO structure of dative verbs as well as the active form and passive form of transitive verbs. The results indicated that the syntactic priming effect occurred in both sentence structures. And this effect was not influenced by variations in conceptual characteristics but specific to the features of sentence form. Syntactic priming reflects the abstract sentences representations constructed by language users in the process of language, which provides strong support for the study of language representation and acquisition. Thus, syntactic priming is not only a phenomenon that extends to language production and comprehension but also a research method used by linguistics to detect the本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。