Processing (the) events: Lexical and structural ingredients of inner aspect

Abstract

What is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both these questions. In the first experiment, a processing correlate of telicity is identified by manipulating verbal telicity (inherently telic vs. unspecified verbs) and direct object quantization, finding a principled delay in the use of these verbs’ aspectual representation in which both the verb and its internal argument are required before the comprehension system can commit to a telic or atelic interpretation. In the second experiment, this processing correlate reveals no differences in processing between inherently atelic and unspecified verbs, delayed or otherwise. We argue that together these experiments support theories that distinguish between two verb classi- fications, a class of inherently telic verbs and a class of unspecified verbs, but not those that include a class of inherently atelic verbs