Fig 2 - uploaded by Yiyun Liao
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Mean values of the position of a moving agent in relation to a reference object on the bar (from 0 to 100).
Source publication
Two Dutch directional prepositions (i.e., naar and richting) provide a useful paradigm to study endpoint conceptualization. Experiment 1 adopted a sentence comprehension task and confirmed the linguistic proposal that, when naar was used in motion event descriptions, participants were more certain that the reference object was the goal of the agent...
Context in source publication
Citations
... Clearly, there is an advantage of combining the effects of both the actor's goal and the interlocutor's status in motion description studies. However, rarely have any studies have done so, except for a recent study conducted by Liao et al. (2021). In their study, two Dutch directional prepositions (i.e., naar 'to' and richting 'towards/direction') have provided a nice paradigm for this. ...
... The current study is an extension of Liao et al. (2021). We aim to investigate the effects of the actor's goal and the interlocutor's status on the choice between a different pair of directional prepositions in a different language, that is, two English directional prepositions (i.e., to and towards) during motion event description. ...
... We aim to investigate the effects of the actor's goal and the interlocutor's status on the choice between a different pair of directional prepositions in a different language, that is, two English directional prepositions (i.e., to and towards) during motion event description. Furthermore, the current study also goes beyond Liao et al. (2021). Before we explain why this is the case, we would like to first provide a brief summary of Liao et al. (2021) and highlight the limitation of their study that we are about address in the current paper. ...
The current study aims to explore the factors that could affect people’s description of a motion event endpoint. The study conducted by Liao, Dijkstra, and Zwaan (2021, Language and Cognition, 13[2], 161–190) found that two non-linguistic factors (i.e., the actor’s goal and the interlocutor’s social status) affect people’s choice between two Dutch directional prepositions (i.e., naar and richting) during event description tasks. The current study aims to extend these findings by examining the choice between a similar pair of directional prepositions in English (i.e., to and towards). Moreover, we aim to study whether grammatical aspect (i.e., the English simple present and the English progressive aspect) affects the sensitivity to the two non-linguistic factors and consequently also affects how people describe a motion event endpoint. In Experiment 1, we used the English simple present for all sentence stimuli (e.g., he walks (?) the trash bin). We found a significant effect of Interlocutor (the interlocutor’s social status) on preposition choice, but no significant effect of Intention (the actor’s goal). In Experiment 2, we replaced the English simple present with the English progressive aspect (e.g., he is walking (?) the trash bin). We found significant main effects of both Interlocutor and Intention on preposition choice. These findings extend those reported in Liao et al. (2021) Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 35(4), 498–520 in that protagonist intention and interlocutor status were found to indeed affect motion event endpoint description. The current findings furthermore show that grammatical aspect affects people’s sensitivity to these factors, thus also affecting how a motion event endpoint is described.
