Syntactic representations encode grammatical functions: evidence from the priming of mapping between grammatical functions and thematic roles in Cantonese

A structural priming study examined whether the mapping between grammatical functions (e.g. subject) and thematic roles (e.g. agent) persists across utterances. Specifically, we tested whether native Cantonese speakers are more likely to produce a standard subject-verb-object (SVO) active or a standard passive sentence after repeating an active sentence in object-subject-verb (OSV) order where the direct object (i.e. patient) is grammatically marked as a topic. Such Topic-OSV and standard active sentences share the same agent-subject and patient-direct object mapping, but they differ in all other important aspects including constituent structure, information structure, and linear thematic role order. In contrast, Topic-OSV and passive sentences only share information structure and thematic role order. The results demonstrated that Topic-OSV prime sentences primed SVO actives rather than passives, suggesting that grammatical function-thematic role mapping is a major source of structural priming. We thus argue that our sentence representations encode grammatical functions.