Referentiality, individuation and incompletive readings

An-qi, Zhang

doi:10.1007/s10831-020-09217-5

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…The opposite holds for atelic descriptions (A girl drew balloons for half an hour is fine, but not A girl drew balloons in half an hour; Dowty, 1979;Smith, 1991). 1 Lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic factors contribute to the telicity profile of a predicate (Borer, 2005;Jackendoff, 1996;Kratzer, 2004), and even though the roles of these factors may vary, telicity is robustly present cross-linguistically (Bar-El et al, 2005;Botne, 2003;Filip, 2004;Friedrich & Gateva, 2017;Kardos, 2016;Singh, 1998;Soh & Kuo, 2005;Zhang, 2020).…”

Section: Internal Structure Of Events In Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given that boundedness is encoded in different ways across languages (Bar-El et al, 2005;Botne, 2003;Filip, 2004;Friedrich & Gateva, 2017;Kardos, 2016;Singh, 1998;Soh & Kuo, 2005;Zhang, 2020), and that these differences affect the acquisition of aspect (e.g., Hacohen, 2012;Stoicescu & Dressler, 2022;van Hout, 2007), it remains to be seen how children's nonlinguistic boundedness generalizations interface with the development of aspectual distinctions. There are various possibilities for how the two notions develop in young learners.…”

Section: (Un)boundedness and Event Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Boundedness supports children’s event representations.

Ji,

Papafragou

2024

Developmental Psychology

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Natural languages distinguish between telic predicates that denote events leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g., draw a balloon) and atelic predicates that denote events with no inherent endpoint (e.g., draw balloons). Telicity distinctions in many languages are already partly available to 4-5-year-olds. Here, using exclusively nonlinguistic tasks and a sample of English-speaking children, we ask whether young learners use corresponding temporal notions to characterize event structure-that is, whether children represent events in cognition as bounded temporal entities with a specified endpoint or unbounded temporal units that could in principle extend indefinitely. We find that 4-5-year-old children in our sample compute boundedness during an event categorization task (Experiment 1) and distinguish event boundedness from event completion (Experiment 2). Furthermore, 4-5-year-olds in our sample evaluate interruptions at event endpoints versus midpoints differently-but only for events that are construed as bounded, presumably because in such construals, events truly culminate (Experiment 3). We conclude that young children represent events in terms of foundational and abstract temporal properties. These properties could support the acquisition of linguistic aspectual distinctions and further scaffold the way children conceptualize and process their dynamic experiences. Public Significance StatementThe present study shows that 4-5-year-old children classify and interpret events in terms of abstract temporal structure (i.e., the way an event begins, develops, and ends). The sensitivity to event temporal profiles could support the acquisition of temporal distinctions in language and further scaffold the way children conceptualize and process their dynamic experience.

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