An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Psychological Impact of Different Grammaticalizations of the Future

Abstract

Considering how fundamental and ubiquitous temporal information is in discourse (e.g., Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998), it seems rather surprising that the impact of the grammaticalization of the future on the way we perceive the future has only been scarcely studied. We argue that this may be due to its rather abstract nature and how it has been previously operationalized. In this review, we lay the foundation for studying the impact of the grammaticalization of the future on mental representations of the future by taking an interdisciplinary perspective, connecting cognitive sciences, linguistics, psycholinguistics, economics, and health psychology. More specifically, we argue that experimental psycholinguistics, combined with more applied domains, constitute a promising research avenue.

Is the future near or far depending on the verb tense markers used? An experimental investigation into the effects of the grammaticalization of the future

“…Perceptual traces of different mental representations may surface with more clean-cut categories. To the best of our knowledge, there has been very little research on such comparisons [ 16 ]. Although this may be a legitimate possibility, we would still advocate investigating possible effects with a different paradigm than that tested in the present paper, especially in regards with the lack of a signal of possible perceptual effects.…”

“…One interpretation was that French may actually not be the ideal language to test our hypothesis, as PF may only be partly present in French and mostly in spoken language. As such, French-speakers may not be as familiar with reading about the future in the present tense, at least not as familiar as German-speakers [ 16 ]. A potential novelty effect could have masked a potential FTR effect.…”

“…In the present study, we examine the impact of the grammaticalization of the future, that is, the grammatical manifestations of how to refer to the future, and how these grammaticalizations may impact our representations of future events. This approach differs from other experimental studies within the field of future time reference and temporal discounting [ 14 , 15 ], in that we try to unravel the possible underlying cognitive processes involved from a psycholinguistic perspective, as delineated in our previous theoretical work [ 16 ].…”

“…In contrast, for French speakers it is more common to use a more obligatory form–at least when written [ 28 ]. For this paper, we use the terms high and low degrees of FTR to refer to two different situations, as in Jäggi et al [ 16 ]. When comparing French and German, it refers to whether a language requires an obligatory marking (i.e., high degree of FTR) or not (i.e., low degree of FTR).…”

“…The impact of the LSH is still unsettled given the different results reported by various experimental studies [ 14 , 15 , 33 ]. Thus, our goal in the present study is to reassess the LSH and its assumed effects on temporal discounting and delayed gratification from an experimental psycholinguistic approach, as extensively discussed in Jäggi et al [ 16 ]. In using such an approach, not only can we address the issue of causality–and overcome issues related to correlational studies [ 9 – 11 ]–, but we can also examine the underlying cognitive mechanism at the heart of the assumed effect.…”