Abstract
In the semantic literature lexical aspect is often treated as a property of VPs or even of whole sentences. Does the interpretation of lexical aspect – contrary to the incrementality assumption commonly made in psycholinguistics – have to wait until the verb and all its arguments are present? To address this issue, we conducted an offline study, two self-paced reading experiments and an eyetracking experiment to investigate aspectual mismatch and aspectual coercion in German sentences while manipulating the position of the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Our findings provide evidence that mismatch detection and aspectual repair depend on a complete verb-argument structure. When the verb didn’t receive all its (minimally required) arguments no mismatch or coercion effects showed up at the mismatching or coercing stimulus. Effects were delayed until a later point after all the arguments had been encountered. These findings have important consequences for semantic theory and for processing accounts of aspectual semantics. As far as semantic theory is concerned, it has to model lexical aspect as a supralexical property coming only into play at the sentence level. For theories of semantic processing the results are even more striking because they indicate that (at least some) semantic phenomena are processed on a more global level than it would be expected assuming incremental semantic interpretation.
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Notes
- 1.
It may be objected that the examples become sensical when coerced into an iteration of reaching events. Acceptability ratings for examples like these, however, indicate that naive informants are not aware of this possibility (Bott, 2010). On the basis of these findings I make a categorical distinction between cases of aspectual mismatch and coercion.
- 2.
For complement coercion, things look different. Numerous studies have demonstrated that this type of coercion clearly enhances processing load (for an overview see eg. Pylkkänen and McElree (2006)).
- 3.
However, Heim and Kratzer (1998) actually argue for top-down interpretation which is somewhat different from the bottom-up approach chosen here. What is crucial here is that top-down interpretation also requires a complete sentence to compute a meaning for it.
- 4.
An anonymous reviewer pointed to an alternative explanation which is exactly the opposite, ie. a speed-up due to irrevelant intervening material. Again, this may have obscured a potential effect at the object region. We fully agree that this is possible, too. No matter which explanation is correct, we think it is crucial to show that aspectual processing is delayed until the verb has received its minimally required arguments. Anticipating what is yet to come, this is exactly the kind of effect we observed in both of the following experiments.
- 5.
In addition to the measures reported here we analyzed first fixation durations. Since there were no differences we refrain from reporting these.
- 6.
If a region receives no fixations, its information was most probably already available due to parafoveal preview of the preceding segment or predictive parsing.
- 7.
We will refer to them loosely as regressions out.
- 8.
We cannot go into the details here, but statistical analyses of the complete sentence also taking into account the subsequent spillover regions didn’t yield a coercion effect whatsoever.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Sam Featherston, Fritz Hamm, Janina Rad and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are, of course, the author’s responsibility. The research reported here was supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) funding the Collaborative Research Centres 441 and 833.
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Bott, O. (2013). The Processing Domain of Aspectual Interpretation. In: Arsenijević, B., Gehrke, B., Marín, R. (eds) Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5983-1_8
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