It is proposed that subjects of transitive verbs in English are perceived as belonging to a semantic hierarchy, with human subjects most acceptable and non-human subjects less so. As a test, six semantically defined classes of subjects were systematically interchanged in simple, well-formed sentences: in Experiment I, 25 students rated the resultant sentences for acceptability; in Experiment II, 25 more students altered one word in the same sentences to make more sense. The results affirmed the following hierarchy: human nouns, animal nouns, concrete-count nouns, concrete-mass nouns, abstract-count nouns, and abstract-mass nouns. In Experiment I, a subject higher in the hierarchy was found to replace one lower down more sensibly than the reverse; in Experiment II, the alterations were consistent with these judgments. The results suggest that, linguistically, the features [+Human], [+Animate], and [+Concrete] are canonical or unmarked in the semantic representation of subjects. The consequences of this are discussed for the processes of interpreting and composing sentences.
[1]
P. Witty.
The teacher's word book of 30,000 words.
,
1945
.
[2]
G. Miller.
Some psychological studies of grammar.
,
1962
.
[3]
H. E. King,et al.
REACTION TIME AND SPEED OF VOLUNTARY MOVEMENT BY NORMAL AND PSYCHOTIC SUBJECTS.
,
1965,
The Journal of psychology.
[4]
Herbert H. Clark,et al.
Some structural properties of simple active and passive sentences
,
1965
.
[5]
George Lakoff,et al.
On The Nature Of Syntactic Irregularity
,
1965
.
[6]
G. Lakoff.
Stative Adjectives and Verbs in English
,
1966
.
[7]
S. C. Johnson.
Hierarchical clustering schemes
,
1967,
Psychometrika.
[8]
Noam Chomsky,et al.
The Sound Pattern of English
,
1968
.
[9]
John Lyons,et al.
Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
,
1971
.
[10]
Herbert H. Clark,et al.
THE USE OF SYNTAX IN UNDERSTANDING SENTENCES
,
1968
.
[11]
Herbert H. Clark,et al.
Linguistic processes in deductive reasoning.
,
1969
.