Abstract
Linguistic events have long been known to systematically differ with respect to whether they proceed to a natural and necessary end point, or not. Semantic and syntactic accounts of these systematic differences disagree as to which kind of event is more complex, and thus more computationally costly, but both approaches identify the VP (not the verb alone) as the domain for aspectual interpretation. We review the existing processing literature, which is broadly consistent with VP-domain hypotheses but does not address the issue of representational complexity. We present a series of experiments that provide a more detailed look at the time course of aspectual interpretation, providing clear support for the VP hypothesis. We also argue that syntactic and semantic complexity effects can be seen in aspectual processing. Terminative syntactic structure and durative semantic interpretation are both costly.
We would like to thank Alan Beretta, for bringing us together to work on this project a rather long time ago – without him this work would never have happened. We also thank David Adger, Daniel Harbour, Sarah VanWagenen and colleagues and audiences too numerous to mention for feedback at various stages of the development of this work.
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Notes
- 1.
The terminology of aspect is notoriously complicated and some clarification for this chapter is in order. The term aspect here will refer to what is called lexical aspect, situation aspect, inner aspect, or aktionsarten in other work. Grammatical aspect (also called viewpoint aspect or outer aspect) will be explicitly mentioned when necessary. We will focus in particular on the dimension of telicity (whether an even has a natural end or not) and use durative (atelic) and terminative (telic) to refer to the two aspectual interpretations of interest here.
- 2.
Sentence judgments are as follows: a * indicates ungrammaticality, a # indicates an unavailable reading. Often in this chapter, # will indicate that the event modified by in X time cannot receive an end-point interpretation.
- 3.
Both mass nouns like beer and bare plurals like planes are known for allowing durative interpretations. Bare plurals are argued to allow ‘{aspectual leaks}’ because of the cumulativity of their denotation Verkuyl (1987). A syntactic hallmark of these two phrases, and of mass interpretation in general, is their lack of determiner in languages which allow bare nominals.
- 4.
Note that Fodor and Garrett failed to find a correspondence between the number of syntactic transformations assumed in Chomsky (1965), and the dependent measures in their experiments (e.g. number of errors in a paraphrase task). This may or may not be compelling evidence against, say, the theory of the passive transformation in Chomsky (1965), but it is certainly not a compelling reason to assume there should be no relationship between representational and derivational linguistic complexity and processing costs. See Phillips (1996, Chap. 5) for further discussion.
- 5.
The issue of how exactly syntactic argument structure relates to event/thematic role is too complicated and controversial to engage within this chapter. Bacrach et al. (2014) review the range of approaches and current state of the debate. For our purposes it suffices that the internal argument of a non-psych transitive verb is typically interpreted as a theme or patient argument
- 6.
Liina Pylkkänen (p.c.) noted that a closer inspection of the materials used in Gennari and Poeppel (2003) revealed that many of the eventive verbs were in fact also achievement verbs, and therefore telic. Since stative verbs are thought to be generally atelic, it is unclear whether their effect is truly driven by a stative/eventive distinction or by a distinction in telicity.
- 7.
We return to the issue of experimental task in § 8.2.3
- 8.
Like aspectual coercion which results from a mismatch between the aspectual requirements of an adverbial modifier and the aspectual properties of the VP, complement coercion involves a mismatch. Verbs like begin, start, try, etc. typically take clausal complements that denote events, as in (i.b). When these verbs are combined with simple nominal direct objects (i.a), Pustejovsky (1995) argues that comprehenders must coerce the nominal (the book) into some kind of event to resolve the mismatch between the verb’s eventive selectional requirements and the direct object’s non-eventive properties.
-
(i)
-
a.
John began the book.
-
b.
John began to read the book.
-
a.
A number of studies report reading time and related measures showing that, like aspectual coercion, complement coercion is behaviorally costly (McElree et al. 2001, 2006; Pickering et al. 2005; Traxler et al. 2002; Traxler et al. 2005; Pylkkänen and McElree 2007; Husband et al. 2011). Brennan and Pyllkänen interpret the finding of an AMF response for aspectual coercion in their 2008 study, and for complement coercion in Pylkkänen and McElree (2007); Pylkkänen et al. (2009), as evidence that both phenomena share similar processing mechanisms. See Pylkkänen et al. (2009) for further discussion.
-
(i)
- 9.
Note that we are simplifying Paczynski et al.’s design slightly for the purposes of highlighting the comparison with the previous literature. We discuss their additional manipulations in § 8.2.3.
- 10.
Todorova et al. (2000) report an Experiment 2, which includes frequency adverbials (the source of Pickering et al’s materials). Using the same self-paced stop-making-sense reading task as their Experiment 1 (above), they found that the cost for processing a frequency adverbial (every years) following a telic VP (sent letters) were significantly greater than for the same adverbial following an atelic VP (sent a letter), but that the magnitude and duration of the effect were much smaller for the frequency adverbials than for the durative (for years).
Paczynski et al. (2014) also consider frequency adverbials. In addition to the punctual vs. durative adverbial manipulation (14), they also included frequency adverbials as in (26).
-
(26)
-
a.
Several times, the cat pounced on the rubber mouse. [FA-PV]
-
b.
Several times, the cat prowled about the backyard. [FA-DV]
-
a.
Critically, Paczynski et al used adverbials such as several times, which assert the existence of multiple, repeated, events, rather than the universally quantified, morphologically singular adverbials used by Todorova and Pickering and their colleagues. Paczynski et al. were interested in distinguishing between possible explanations for what exactly it is about the durative adverbial + telic event sentences that triggers processing costs (the initial aspectual mismatch? the repeated event interpretation solution?), and the frequency adverbials they chose to use were appropriate for their purposes, but not so useful for ours.
-
(26)
- 11.
All statistics reported in this chapter were generated using linear mixed effects modeling techniques, with subjects and items as random factors (Baayen et al. 2008). Model comparison techniques were employed, and the statistics we report are for the best fitting model that converged (Barr et al. 2013). More details about the model and its parameters are in the chapter.
- 12.
As above in Experiment 1, we employed linear mixed modeling and model comparison techniques and report the statistics of the best fitting model.
- 13.
Equivalent to one screen refresh on a 60 Hz monitor.
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Husband, E., Stockall, L. (2015). Building Aspectual Interpretations Online. In: de Almeida, R., Manouilidou, C. (eds) Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10112-5_8
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