Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation

The grammatical relations of noun phrases in sentences are ordered in a hierarchy that is reflected in a wide array of linguistic phenomena. The hypothesis explored in this paper is that this hierarchy is related to the conceptual accessibility of the intended referents of noun phrases that commonly occur in particular relational roles, with relations higher in the hierarchy typically occupied by noun phrases representing more accessible concepts. An experiment on the formulation of sentences examined the relationship betweeen conceptual accessibility and grammatical relations for three levels in the hierarchy, the subject, direct object, and indirect object. There was a strong and systematic influence of conceptual accessibility on the surface syntactic structure of sentences. The attribution of this effect to grammatical role assignments, rather than to serial ordering mechanisms, was supported by the absence of an effect of conceptual accessibility on the order of nouns in conjunctive noun phrases. This pattern of results can be explained within current theories of sentence production.