On Wednesday 06 March 2002 22:26, Joseph Hilferty wrote:
> Dick Hudson wrote:
> > Joe:
> > >In English, at least, the experimental evidence suggests that subject
> > >does have attentional content. There's still a lot of work left to do
> > >to make the claim stick, but it seems that subject = locus of attention.
> > >(I can explain the experiments, if anybody's interested.)
> >
> > ## Yes please. Can we interpret this claim as being 'subject = FIRST
> > locus of attention'?
>
> Yes, this would probably be a better characterization, I think. However,
> the experiments I've read have kept things pretty simple, at least, if
> I remember correctly.
>
> Linda Forrest has worked on Talmy-style sentences such as "The sun is
> over the house" and "The house is under the sun." Her work shows that
> reaction times vary depending on whether the visual cue is congruent
> with the sentence. So, for example, if the the house is cued, then the
> house is more easily processed as a subject.
>

When I read those two examples, the first one parsed into 'The sun is under
the house' - leadning me to go back and check it. Is that the 'effect' the
experiment is intended to examine?

> Tomlin has done something similar. He showed a video of a big fish
> eating a little fish, and the experimental subjects were expected to
> describe the scene. The experimental manipulation was to flash an arrow
> to either the big or the little fish just before the speaker cast the
> description (i.e., within the bounds of the speaker's short-term
> memory).
>
> Invariably, if the arrow goes to the big fish, speakers use active voice
> ("The big fish ate the little fish"); if the arrow goes to the little
> fish, speakers use the passive ("The little fish was eaten by the big
> fish").
>
> In both cases, what you get is the subject corresponding to the
> situational topic. (In fact, what we see is the visual information
> influencing syntactic processing.)
>
> > I can't see how the subject of a long sentence can still
> > claim to be the locus of attention at the point when it's all wrapped up
> > and processed and all the attention is on the end of the sentence. If the
> > locus of attention does indeed shift, as I'm suggesting, does your claim
> > boil down to 'subject = first element/argument'?
> >
> > >A nice test would be a Spanish psych verb like GUSTAR (with the
> > >unmarked DAT-V-SUBJ order). If the dative participant turned out to
> > >be attentionally more salient, then we might write the whole whole
> > >thing down to leftwardness, i.e., topics tend to be expressed
> > >first.
> >
> > ## Even if you find that the DAT is the (first) locu of attention, your
> > original claim could survive as "subject = DEFAULT (FIRST?) locus of
> > attention".
>
> True enough. I hadn't thought about that. This way we wouldn't have
> to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
>
> Joe
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