Aspectual Asymmetries in the Mental Representation of Events: Significance of lexical Inherent Aspect
نویسندگان
چکیده
Aspect contributes important temporal information for the construction of situation models in the human mind. Previous studies examining the effect of grammatical aspect on accomplishment verbs (e.g. bake a cake) show that perfective sentences/utterances are processed faster than imperfective ones (Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Chan et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2004, in press). The present study, however, shows strong interaction between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. More specifically, the results show that perfective facilitation is found on accomplishment verbs, while imperfective facilitation is found on activity verbs. We suggest that this is because the inherent atelic nature of activity verbs matches the unbounded features associated with imperfectives.
منابع مشابه
Aspectual asymmetries in the mental representation of events: Role of lexical and grammatical aspect.
Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have shown that perfective sentences are often proce...
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