Abstract
The present study investigates the cross-linguistic processing of aspect in English and German. Three self-paced reading experiments provide evidence that coercion of a (simple) past accomplishment into an activity reading causes processing difficulty in English (Experiment 1), but not in German (Experiments 2 and 3). We attribute this cross-linguistic difference to immediate aspectual specification in English, whereas we find delayed aspectual specification in German.
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Notes
- 1.
We will use the term eventuality, which is intended to refer to all kinds of situations, that is, events in the narrow sense but also processes and states.
- 2.
Perspective is, of course, a purely metaphorical description that has to be made more precise (cf. Klein 1994, 2009). We will nevertheless stick to this metaphor since it can be made precise. This is, however, well beyond the scope of the present article (but see van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005) and their use of hierarchical planning to model perfectivity).
- 3.
We would like to thank Barbara Schmiedtová for pointing this out to us. We should also note that whenever we speak of ‘perfective accomplishment’ in either English or German, we refer to an accomplishment that is assigned a perfective meaning. This parlance is in no way intended to presuppose the existence of a perfective form in the respective language.
- 4.
Google search: baute(n) (built) ≈ 42 million hits versus war(en) am bauen/dabei zu bauen (was/were at build/at-it to build) = 608 hits. Contrary to German, the periphrastic progressive is much more frequent in Dutch (von Stutterheim et al. 2009).
- 5.
One of the reviewers pointed out to us that definiteness of the direct object might be a crucial factor for the observed preferences. We have the same intuition (if we compare, for example, build the house vs. build a house), but have to leave this a question for future research.
- 6.
To account for violations of spehericity, degrees of freedom were corrected in the ANOVAs using the Greenhouse-Geisser correction. For readability we will always report the uncorrected degrees of freedom in the text.
- 7.
To account for length differences of the adverbials, we also analyzed residual reading times of the adverbial region in the heavy NP shift conditions. ANOVAs revealed a main effect of construction that was marginal by participants (F 1(2, 58) = 2. 59, p = 0. 09) and significant by items (F 1(2, 94) = 3. 76, p < 0. 05). This effect was due to the fact that progressive for was numerically read more slowly (mean RT 100.89 ms) than simple for (mean RT −1.25) and simple within (mean RT 33.32 ms), respectively. This suggests that heavy NP shift has a stronger disruptive effect on sentences with a verb in the progressive than with a verb in the simple past.
- 8.
One of the reviewers suggested that the lack of difference in the heavy NP shift conditions may be because the object contributes to Aktionsart. At the time the adverbial comes in, the processor may thus not have decided on an accomplishment reading yet and the integration of the adverbial may therefore be easy. If correct, this explanation would nicely fit aspectual underspecification – that is, underspecified Aktionsart of a yet incomplete verb-argument structure (for a proposal in this direction see Bott 2013). We have to leave this a topic for future research.
- 9.
In contrast to the English study, we used in x time instead of within x time as control conditions. This was done because German within PPs require a genitive noun phrase (innerhalb zweier Jahre) or select for an of PP (innerhalb von zwei Jahren), respectively, making them very hard to compare with the coercion conditions. A norming study revealed, however, that German in-adverbials after a past tense (preterite) verb were interpreted exactly like German within adverbials. That is the potentially ambiguous in-adverbials were immediately interpreted as duration adverbials and did not receive a time locating meaning, that is, from now on x time in the future. Details about the norming study can be found in an extended version of the article on the first author’s website.
- 10.
To account for length differences we also computed ANOVAs analyzing residual reading times of the adverbial. The analyses revealed neither significant main effects nor a significant interaction (all F 1∕2 < 1).
- 11.
Again, we computed an additional statistical analysis for residual reading times. The effects were the same as in the ANOVA of the raw RTs. The main effects of duration (F 1(1, 39) = 20. 68, p < 0. 01; F 2(1, 39) = 20. 77, p < 0. 01) and adverbial (F 1(1, 39) = 10. 99, p < 0. 01; F 2(1, 39) = 4. 14, p < 0. 05) were significant, but their interaction was not(F 1(1, 39) = 1. 43, p = 0. 24; F 2 < 1). Paired t tests revealed no significant difference (t 1∕2 < 1. 3) between short for (mean residual RT −48.94 ms) and short in (mean residual RT −17.46 ms).
- 12.
More details can be found on the first author’s website where an extended version of the present paper can be downloaded. See Sect. 5 of the extended version of the paper for semantic derivations of the English and German examples.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, Barbara Hemforth, and Barbara Schmiedtová as well as two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft; furthermore Janina Radó for valuable suggestions on many issues of the present research and for her help in constructing the English experimental materials. We would also like to thank the audience at the AMLaP 2009 conference in Barcelona where this work was presented. The research was made possible by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to projects C1 of the SFB 441 (“Linguistic data structures”) and B1 of the SFB 833 (“The construction of meaning”) at the University of Tübingen. Last but not least, we would like to thank Stig Oppedal for proof reading the final version of the paper.
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Bott, O., Hamm, F. (2014). Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect. In: Hemforth, B., Mertins, B., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds) Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05675-3_4
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