Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect

Bott, Oliver J.; Hamm, Friedrich

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-05675-3_4

Cited by 15 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Else, the aspectual interpretation remains underspecified. (Bott & Hamm, 2014) Bott and Hamm (2014) conducted a cross-linguistic selfpaced reading study in which they compared processing difficulty of aspectual coercion in German and English. They investigated whether the amount of processing difficulty resulting from coercion of an accomplishment (e.g.…”

Section: Language Cognition and Neurosciencementioning

confidence: 99%

The cross-linguistic processing of aspect – an eyetracking study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in Russian and German

Bott

Gattnar

2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Section: Language Cognition and Neurosciencementioning

confidence: 99%

The cross-linguistic processing of aspect – an eyetracking study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in Russian and German

Bott

Gattnar

2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…2 Obviously, this interacts with the grammatical aspect of the verb since the example would be fully acceptable if the accomplishment were in the progressive instead of the simple past. We will largely ignore the interaction between lexical and grammatical aspect here and refer the reader to Bott and Hamm (2014) for further discussion. In the remainder of the paper, point action verbs will also be referred to as semelfactives (Smith, 1991).…”

Section: Lexical Aspect Aspectual Coercion and Coercion Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Schmiedtová 2012and Bott and Hamm (2014)). This construction type should therefore be similar to the English example 14.…”

Section: Lexical Aspect Aspectual Coercion and Coercion Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

10. Can Semantic Theories Be Tested Experimentally? The Case of Aspectual Coercion

Bott¹

2016

Mood, Aspect, Modality Revisited

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This paper reflects upon the relation between semantic/pragmatic theory and psycholinguistic experiments within the realm of aspectual coercion. What predictions can be derived from standard and not so standard theories for incremental aspectual interpretation? We contrast operator-based and underspecification accounts of aspectual coercion with the Event Calculus of Hamm & van Lambalgen (2005), a pragmatic theory of tense and aspect, which proposes a classification of coercion into different types. We present the results of an ERP study on one particular kind of coercion (adding an eventuality = "additive coercion") showing that aspectual coercion is not necessarily triggered by an aspectual mismatch. We will then present a self-paced reading experiment on contextual influences in additive coercion which suggests that aspectual processing immediately takes into account the larger discourse context. Taken together, the first two experiments provide clear evidence against a semantic operator-based account but indicate that aspectual coercion heavily relies on pragmatic inference. Two further self-paced reading experiments compared different subtypes of aspectual coercion with each other (deletion of an eventuality = "subtractive coercion" and * I would like to thank the audiences of the TRAIT workshop How categorical are categories? in Wroclaw 2013 and an invited talk at the German department in Cologne 2013 for their comments on the work presented in this paper. I would also like to thank Johannes Dölling, Fritz Hamm, Janina Radó, Edith Scheifele, Matthias Schlesewsky and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on the research reported in this paper. The usual disclaimers apply, any remaining errors are mine. The research was funded by the German Science Foundation within projects C1 and B1 in the Collaborative Research Centers 441 and 833 at the University of Tübingen. two types of iteration of an eventuality = "abstract type shift"). The results indicate that different kinds of coercion do in fact lead to differences in how they are processed. Most strikingly, different coercion subtypes which should involve the same operator-an iterative operator-revealed different coercion costs. Taken together, the experiments demonstrate that a operator-based coercion theory or underspecification account cannot fully account for the data. The predictions of Event Calculus, however, were fully confirmed by the experiments. Event Calculus thus allows us to derive empirically valid predictions about the underlying cognitive processes while incrementally constructing a temporal model of the unfolding discourse.

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“…Piñango et al (1999) were the first to show, using a lexical decision task, that responses took longer when sentences required aspectual coercion (iterating a punctual event: e.g., “The insect hopped effortlessly until it reached the far end of the garden” vs. “The insect glided effortlessly until it reached the far end of the garden”; see also Todorova et al, 2000; Piñango et al, 2006). Evidence for delayed aspectual processing was provided by Piñango et al (2006), who showed experimentally that the costs of coercion are not present at the point of syntactic licensing (e.g., “until” in the examples above), but appear further downstream in the sentence (Bott, 2010; Bott and Hamm, 2014; Bott and Gattnar, 2015). Although, subsequent research found no effects in self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments for iterative coercions (“hopped”) (Pickering et al, 2006), Townsend (2013) has recently reported increased eye fixations in the adverb and post-adverb regions in iterative coercions, such as in “Howard sent a large check to his daughter for many years.” Piñango and Zurif (2001) investigated jointly complement coercions (“The boy began the book,” where an activity, such as reading, is included in the VP's event structure), aspectual coercions (“The girl jumped until dawn,” requiring iteration) and transparent sentences (e.g., “The boy read the book,” which does not require complement coercion, and “The girl slept until dawn,” which does not require iteration) in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Formal Semantics in the Neurology Clinic: Atypical Understanding of Aspectual Coercion in ALS Patients

et al. 2016

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Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease of the motor system with subtle adverse effects on cognition. It is still unclear whether ALS also affects language and semantics, and if so, what aspects and processes exactly. We investigated how ALS patients understand verb phrases modified by temporal preposition phrases, e.g., “To watch TV for half an hour.” Interpretation here requires operations such as aspectual coercion that add or delete elements from event structures, depending on temporal modifiers, and constraints on coercion, which make combinations with certain modifiers not viable. Using a theoretically-motivated experimental design, we observed that acceptance rates for aspectual coercion were abnormally high in ALS patients. The effect was largest for the more complex cases of coercion: not those that involve enrichment of event structures (“To switch on the TV in half an hour,” where a number of failed attempts must be included in the interpretation) but those that, if applied, would result in deletion of event structure elements (“To repair the TV for half an hour”). Our experimental results are consistent with a deficit of constraints on coercion, and not with impaired semantic processes or representations, in line with recent studies suggesting that verb semantics is largely spared in ALS.

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Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect

Cited by 15 publications

References 19 publications

The cross-linguistic processing of aspect – an eyetracking study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in Russian and German

The cross-linguistic processing of aspect – an eyetracking study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in Russian and German

10. Can Semantic Theories Be Tested Experimentally? The Case of Aspectual Coercion

Formal Semantics in the Neurology Clinic: Atypical Understanding of Aspectual Coercion in ALS Patients

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