Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
A variety of previous studies have shown that speakers tend to repeat syntacticstructures they have just encountered before, either in production or comprehension(e.g., Bock, 1986; Pickering & Branigan, 1998）. This tendency has been referred to asstructural priming, syntactic persistence or syntactic priming. Discovered by Leveltand Kelter in 1982, and further explored by linguists like Labov and Bock, studies onsyntactic priming have become an important issue researched and discussed in thepsycholinguistic field and has not yet lost its momentum.Research on syntactic priming has focused on monolingual syntactic priming andsyntactic representation, cross-language syntactic priming and language processing,the factors that promote and reduce priming effect. The “within second languageparadigm” is also very important because in many countries the number of bilingualshas steadily increased. More and more people choose to learn a second language,especially in China. To study syntactic priming of a second language by using awith-in language paradigm can help detect what role the first language plays in thelanguage system of bilingual speakers, and uncover their syntactic representation andprocessing.According to Bernolet, Hartsuiker, and Pickering (2017), syntactic structures thatdiffer in constituent order between two languages are represented separately for eachlanguage. Therefore, when the constituent order of the second language is differentfrom a speaker’s first language, he or she must acquire a new syntactic representation.Does that mean that these two syntactic representations are totally parallel? It is stillunclear that if there is any continuity between the language production process inbilingual speakers. Looking into the priming effects of second language syntacticstructures, which are available in second language of bilingual speakers but not intheir first language, can hopefully provide some clues for analyzing and explainingthe issue of syntactic representations in bilingual groups.
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1.2 Objectives and Research Questions
Mandarin Chinese (Chinese hereafter) and English are two typologicallydifferent languages. For a native Mandarin Chinese speaker, speaking Englishinvolves the acquisition and activation of a different language system. This thesisexplores within-English syntactic priming effects in language production.The present study aims to observe syntactic priming based on corpus data collection 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 secondlang，英语论文范文，英语论文题目
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