Interactions between Nouns and Verbs in Interpreting Events

Previous research shows that readers judge inherently unbounded actions to be bounded when (a) a verb describes the irreversible consumption of an object, and (b) the grammatical object is a count noun, rather than a mass noun. We seek to extend these findings by examining whether the mass/count distinction will affect readers’ interpretations of verbs from additional aspectual classes. Participants read scenarios containing either an observation verb (e.g., watching) or a destruction verb with a temporal profile resembling one of three of Vendler’s (1967) classes of lexical aspect: activities (e.g., eating), accomplishments (e.g., destroying), or achievements (e.g., bursting), and responded to questions designed to assess whether they interpreted the entire event as bounded or unbounded. Responses suggest that the presence of physical boundaries on objects will only affect the aspectual class of events in limited circumstances. Results also indicate that, in cases where a VP’s characteristic temporal structure conflicts with its context, the VP’s inherent lexical aspect is overridden, to bring its meaning into line with the context that surrounds it (aspectual coercion).