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Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study

According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, intransitive verbs are divided into unaccusative and unergative ones based on the distinction of their syntactic properties, which has been proved by previous theoretical and empirical evidence. However, debate has been raised regarding whether intransitive...

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Autores principales: Wang, Xin, Feng, Shiwen, Zhou, Tongquan, Wang, Renyu, Wu, Guowei, Ni, Fengshan, Yang, Yiming
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8394217/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34439601
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11080983
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author Wang, Xin
Feng, Shiwen
Zhou, Tongquan
Wang, Renyu
Wu, Guowei
Ni, Fengshan
Yang, Yiming
author_facet Wang, Xin
Feng, Shiwen
Zhou, Tongquan
Wang, Renyu
Wu, Guowei
Ni, Fengshan
Yang, Yiming
author_sort Wang, Xin
collection PubMed
description According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, intransitive verbs are divided into unaccusative and unergative ones based on the distinction of their syntactic properties, which has been proved by previous theoretical and empirical evidence. However, debate has been raised regarding whether intransitive verbs in Mandarin Chinese can be split into unaccusative and unergative ones syntactically. To analyze this theoretical controversy, the present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural processing of deep unaccusative, unergative sentences, and passive sentences (derived structures undergoing a syntactic movement) in Mandarin Chinese. The results revealed no significant difference in the neural processing of deep unaccusative and unergative sentences, and the comparisons between passive sentences and the other sentence types revealed activation in the left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG) and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG). These findings indicate that the syntactic processing of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin Chinese is highly similar but different from that of passive verbs, which suggests that deep unaccusative and unergative sentences in Mandarin Chinese are both base-generated structures and that there is no syntactic distinction between unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin Chinese.
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spelling pubmed-83942172021-08-28 Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study Wang, Xin Feng, Shiwen Zhou, Tongquan Wang, Renyu Wu, Guowei Ni, Fengshan Yang, Yiming Brain Sci Article According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, intransitive verbs are divided into unaccusative and unergative ones based on the distinction of their syntactic properties, which has been proved by previous theoretical and empirical evidence. However, debate has been raised regarding whether intransitive verbs in Mandarin Chinese can be split into unaccusative and unergative ones syntactically. To analyze this theoretical controversy, the present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural processing of deep unaccusative, unergative sentences, and passive sentences (derived structures undergoing a syntactic movement) in Mandarin Chinese. The results revealed no significant difference in the neural processing of deep unaccusative and unergative sentences, and the comparisons between passive sentences and the other sentence types revealed activation in the left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG) and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG). These findings indicate that the syntactic processing of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin Chinese is highly similar but different from that of passive verbs, which suggests that deep unaccusative and unergative sentences in Mandarin Chinese are both base-generated structures and that there is no syntactic distinction between unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin Chinese. MDPI 2021-07-24 /pmc/articles/PMC8394217/ /pubmed/34439601 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11080983 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Wang, Xin
Feng, Shiwen
Zhou, Tongquan
Wang, Renyu
Wu, Guowei
Ni, Fengshan
Yang, Yiming
Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study
title Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study
title_full Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study
title_fullStr Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study
title_full_unstemmed Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study
title_short Brain Regions Involved in Underlying Syntactic Processing of Mandarin Chinese Intransitive Verbs: An fMRI Study
title_sort brain regions involved in underlying syntactic processing of mandarin chinese intransitive verbs: an fmri study
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8394217/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34439601
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11080983
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