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

Abstract

This paper reports a cross-linguistic study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in an aspect language (Russian) and a non-aspect language (German). In Russian, mereological semantics led us to expect incremental mismatch detection independently of the presence or absence of the verbal arguments. In German, however, mismatch effects should be delayed until the processor has encountered the complete predication. These predictions were tested in two eyetracking during reading experiments. We investigated the processing of achievement verbs modified by aspectually mismatching adverbials in Russian (Exp. 1) and German (Exp. 2) and manipulated the word order in such a way that the mismatch occurred before or after the predication was complete. The data show that Russian readers immediately noticed the mismatch independently of whether the verb preceded or followed its arguments, whereas German readers showed mismatch effects only after a complete predication. We take this as evidence for cross-linguistically different increment sizes in event interpretation.

Keywords:

• incrementality
• grammatical aspect
• lexical aspect
• cross-linguistic differences
• German
• Russian

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Polina Berezovskaya, Fritz Hamm, Robin Hörnig, Janina Radó, Fabian Schlotterbeck, Wolfgang Sternefeld and the participants of the Oberseminar WS 2014/15 of Sigrid Beck and Sonja Tiemann for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also go to Manuel Carreiras and an anonymous reviewer of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. We would also like to thank Anna Schmid, Anna Pryslopska and Johanna Heininger for data collection and Salome Dimmer for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. The usual disclaimer applies – all remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This research was funded by the German Science Foundation within projects B1 and C2 of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 833 “The Construction of Meaning” and project Composition in Context (CiC, XPrag.de).

Supplemental data and research materials

The underlying research materials (i.e. the full set of Russian and German materials) for this article can be accessed at http://hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0000-4D88-1@ds1

Notes

1. Perspective is, of course, a purely metaphorical description which has to be made more precise (cf. Klein, 1994, 2009). We will nevertheless stick to this metaphor since it can be made precise.

2. Besides clear activity verbs such jog (which all can be used intransitively) the experiment also tested accomplishment verbs and the local mismatch effect took the form of an interaction between verb type and adverbial. For details, the interested reader is referred to Bott (2010, Exp.2).

3. The actual experiment also included two coercion conditions, namely imperfective sentences with ago-adverbials. Since these are not relevant for the purposes of the present paper, we ignore these conditions and treat trials in these conditions as fillers.

4. Last fixation durations did not differ significantly ().

5. As in the Russian version, the German experiment included two coercion conditions. Since these are not relevant for our present purposes, we will treat them as fillers. There were six lists with six data points per list and experimental condition.

6. The analysis of last fixation durations revealed no significant differences.

7. Proportions of regressions in the adverbial region did not differ between mismatch and control (mismatch: M = 16.2%, control: M = 9.7%; GLME: ).

8. An anonymous reviewer pointed out that the claim that no aspectual processing occurred before having processed the complete predication may be too strong. We fully agree. Our data only provide evidence that in German lexical aspect/Aktionsart is assigned to the complete predication. Crucially, they do not imply that absolutely no event interpretation occurred before that point. We know from the existing literature, for instance, that nominal arguments are immediately related to the event argument via incremental thematic role assignment (e.g., Knoeferle et al., 2005). Our claim thus only concerns lexical aspect/Aktionsart. Furthermore, on the basis of the present results we do not know whether our results also generalise to non-aspect languages other than German. However, we have to leave this a question for future research.

9. The experiment included a third condition which is not relevant for our present purposes and will thus be ignored.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the German Science Foundation within projects B1 and C2 of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 833 “The Construction of Meaning” and project Composition in Context (CiC, XPrag.de).