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Empirical Evidence of Conceptual Discrepancies Between Languages
Abstract
In this chapter, I assess the classification enhanced and proposed in Chap. 3 by means of an empirical study that brings to light the evidence of conceptual discrepancies between languages. The empirical study involves language tests performed with native speakers of Chinese, Italian and Slovenian, who were asked to assess their perception of the degree of completion of the action expressed by verbs. The study attempted to prove two main ideas. (1) That unrelated languages show a greater degree of semantic discrepancy, which is due to structural differences between languages, but also to the idiosyncrasy of conceptualisation in the context of the native language. (2) That the interpretive freedom of the completion of Chinese monomorphemic verbs leads native Chinese speakers to focus more on the category of process than on result, linguistically, but also more generally. The main part of this chapter is devoted to the contrastive analysis and the interpretation of the results for the three languages studied. In the last part, I go into more detail on the use of aspectual markers collected in the language tests to show the different degree of interrelation between lexical and grammatical aspects in the languages studied.KeywordsLanguage testsDegree of completionConceptualisation of aspect
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This volume offers a variety of perspectives on two of the main topics situated at the crossroads between lexical semantics and syntax, namely: (a) aspect and its correspondence with syntactic structure; and (b) the delimitation of syntactic structures from verb classes. Almost from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it has been assumed that verbs invoke a mental image about the way in which eventualities are distributed over time. When it comes to determining time schemata, the lexical class to which the verb belongs represents a first step. Speaking about verb classes does not exclusively mean a semantic similarity; rather, verb classes exhibit a bundle of common features and thus show a set of recursive behavior patterns. Beyond the meaning of the verb, both semantic and syntactic factors, together with pragmatic ones, play a decisive role when establishing the aspectual classification of an eventuality. The contributions collected in this book approach the aforementioned lines, either analyzing the relationships between aspect and syntactic structure or traversing the path from a verb class to its syntactic manifestation. Some of them stress diachronic filiations, while others include processes of word formation in the debate; some of them focus on certain classes, such as movement verbs or psychological verbs, while others examine specific constructions. A number of chapters also discuss relevant theoretical issues concerning the analysis of aspect. In sum, the kaleidoscopic view provided by this book allows the reader to delve deeper into one of the most controversial – as well as exciting – topics within current linguistics.
This article criticizes the widespread view, sometimes referred to as the " aspect first hypothesis " (initiated by Antinucci and Miller 1976 and supported by Bloom et al. 1980; Bickerton 1981; Weist et al. 1984; Shirai and Andersen 1995, among others), according to which a universal acquisition path is postulated in the tense-aspect domain, based on the leading role of actionality (or Aktionsart) and aspect. According to this view, children build their competence starting from the pervasive correlations atelic∴imperfective∴present vs. telic∴perfective∴past, before gradually learning to disentangle (i.e., freely combining) the various actional, aspectual, and temporal components. The alternative view advocated here (typologically-oriented and morphologically-sensitive) claims, instead, that children start out with no predefined strategy and extract the relevant information out of the individual language's morphological structure. The data stem from four longitudinal corpora relating to three Italian children and one Austrian German child, showing that: (i) the strong correlation between actionality, aspect, and tense can only be supported if activity and stative verbs are lumped together within the category of atelic predicates. Once activities are separately examined, their behavior stands out as absolutely incompatible with the traditional view. (ii) In the relevant languages, there can be earlier understanding of the temporality-oriented morphology as contrasted with the aspect-related categories. (iii) The analysis does not support the so-called prototype hypothesis (Shirai and Andersen 1995), since the examined children were strongly affected by their linguistic input from the very beginning. (iv) The children presented (to a greater or lesser extent) a notable verb spurt that very briefly preceded the first uses of the Past tenses. In conclusion, the actual acquisition path followed by the analyzed children undermines the hypothesis of a universal acquisition pattern, supporting instead the view that acquisition depends on the specific morphological shape of the target language.
3 Previous studies of the lexical aspect of verbs following Vendler (1967) cannot account for verbs of degree achievements (Dowty 1979, Hay et al. 1999, among others). Building on recent studies on " scale structure " (Hay et al. 1999, Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010, among others). We introduce a new aspectual feature [±scale] into the traditional Vendler system in order to more comprehensively account for a wider range of verbs. By analyzing verbs/verbal compounds from Mandarin Chinese and following the scalar approach, we propose six aspectual classes that are needed not only to adequately accommodate degree achievements, but also to provide a fuller account of all the verbs. This scalar approach can be applied to the aspectual classification of natural languages in general.
Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the literature.
While working on this project I have received institutional support of several kinds, for which I am most grateful. I thank the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and the Spencer Foundation. for a stimulating environment in which the basic idea of this book was developed. The Max Planck Institute for Psycho linguistics at Nijmegen enabled me to spend several months working on the the manuscript. A National Science Foundation grant to develop Discourse Representation Theory, and a grant from The University Research Institute of the University of Texas, also gave me time to pursue this project. I thank Helen Aristar-Dry for reading early drafts of the manuscript, Osten Dahl for penetrating remarks on a preliminary version, and my collaborator Gilbert Rappaport for relentless comments and questions throughout. People with whom I have worked on particular languages are mentioned in the relevant chapters. lowe a special debt of gratitude to the members of my graduate seminar on aspect in the spring of 1990: they raised many questions of importance which made a real differ ence to the final form of the theory. I have benefitted from presenting parts of this material publicly, including colloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, the University of Texas, and University of Tel Aviv. I thank Adrienne Diehr and Marjorie Troutner for their efficient and good-humored help throughout the work on the first edition.
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Verbs and times in Chinese: Vendler’s four categories. Papers from the parasession on lexical semantics
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