The space for case

The psychological validity of Fillmore's (1971b) theory of case grammar was tested in two experiments. Experiment I used a concept-identification task to see if subjects could learn to recognize case-relations of nouns. Different rates of learning were found for four cases: Agent was easiest to learn, followed by Experiencer, Instrument, and Object. Scaling of confusion data revealed a two-feature cognitive structure for the “psychological” case system: living versus nonliving and active versus passive. Experiment II used a running recognition task to see if the predicate structure of verbs is a salient factor in encoding and long-term storage of sentences. Confusability of sentences was primarily a function of the similarity between the predicate structures of their main verbs. Three models for the access and comparison of sentential information were proposed and tested against the data. The best-fitting model assumed similarity of encoded sentences in memory to be a function of the similarity between the predicate structures of their main verbs, rather than surface or “logical” grammatical functions of their nouns.

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