From conceptual roles to structural relations: Bridging the syntactic cleft.

The distinction between underlying and superficial linguistic structure is a staple of modern cognitive psychology. Despite increasingly diverse conceptions of syntactic relations in linguistic theory, the received view in psycholinguistics has remained one in which the entities assigned to underlying relations may assume different surface relations. This view is examined in the context of language production and evidence is reviewed that the disposition to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation is a basic feature of language use, suggesting that mappings from conceptual categories to syntactic relations form a main support of the bridge from conception to language. Proceeding on this assumption, an evaluation of competing accounts of the mapping process in production is given. Results argue against syntactic relation-changing operations, but favor a division between meaning- and form-related mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)