Imperfect Cuts Betray Knives: The Role of Grammatical Aspect in Event Conceptualization

Background and Aim: Which sentence is more likely to make you think of a knife: Maryam has cut her birthday cake or Maryam is cutting her birthday cake? The sentences are identical in every respect except for their aspect. Grammatical aspect is defined as how an action or event is extended over time, whether it is perfective (complete) or imperfective (incomplete). Previous research suggests that perfective/imperfective aspect makes people to take an external/internal view of events. The question addressed in this study is whether grammatical aspect affects people's access to implied components of events such as action instruments. Methods: We tested our hypothesis using mouse-tracking method. Fifty female students studying at Alzahra University read a simple active sentence in which an actor had done or was doing a manual action (e.g., Maryam has cut/is cutting her birthday cake) with an implied instrument (knife). Then, they saw a picture of the implied instrument and answered whether the implied instrument was mentioned in the sentence they just read by clicking on the PRESENT or ABSENT response button. We predicted that participants would be less efficient at clicking ABSENT in the imperfective condition. Results: We studied the effect of grammatical aspect on the mental activation of instruments in Farsi. We hypothesized that imperfective aspect would activate event knowledge in such a detailed manner that, in a sentence-picture verification task, participants would mistakenly think that the implied instrument with which the stated action is normally performed was present in the sentence. Conclusion: In line with our prediction, we found that the imperfective condition caused significant deviation to the incorrect response PRESENT. However, no significant time differences emerged. The findings provide support for the meaningfulness of grammar assumed in cognitive linguistics showing that different aspectual markings lead people to construct different images of a scene.

کلیدواژه ها:

Grammatical aspect ، event knowledge ، instruments ، mouse tracking ، Farsi