• Oliver Bott, Torgrim Solstad & Jens Michaelis. Processing Non-Culminating Accomplishments across Languages [ poster ]. Paper presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024), Rotterdam, July 24-27, 2024. Published version [ permalink ] appeared in: L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey & E. Hazeltine (eds.), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 3319-3326, 2024.

Abstract

We investigated the processing and interpretation of aspectual coercion in the case of non-culminating accomplishments in English and German. Two offline experiments employing an inference rating task showed that non-culminating accomplishments in both languages actually involve a shift in interpretation. Four self-paced reading experiments furthermore show that this type of coercion isn’t costly – neither in German, a language lacking grammatical aspect, nor in English with an aspectual opposition between progressive and perfective forms. This lack of effect in processing coercion was obtained in a first pair of experiments using adverbial modification (sentence-internally) within the verb phrase and in a second pair of experiments in which aspectual coercion was triggered in a subsequent discourse unit. A final stops-making-sense experiment replicates the lack of effect for English and furthermore shows that the processing of non-culminating accomplishments does not incur a processing effect even in a task calling for immediate full interpretation.

Keywords: Aspectual coercion, lexical aspect, pragmatic inferencing, non-culminating accomplishments, telicity

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