Building aspectual interpretations online

Book section : Chapter

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.

Authors: Husband, M; Stockall, L

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer International Publishing
• Host title: Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing
• Pages: 157-186
• Publication date: 2014-12-09
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-10112-5_8
• ISBN-10: 3319101110
• ISBN-13: 9783319101118
• Language: English
• Keywords: sentence processing; semantic composition; sentence comprehension; aspect; events; telicity
• Subjects: Psychology
• Subtype: Chapter