SUÁREZ CEPEDA SONIA GRISELDA
Congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
?The status of PPs and natural boundaries in an experimental study?
Autor/es:
LUIS PARÍS MOLINA; SONIA SUÁREZ CEPEDA
Lugar:
Santiago de Chile
Reunión:
Congreso; International Congress on Role and reference Grammar (RRG; 2011
Institución organizadora:
Universidad CAtólica Pontificia de Chile
Resumen:

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of an ongoing experimental study that touches upon two prominent issues in RRG: lexical aspect (Aktionarten) types and the argument-adjunct distinction. The experimental study simulates a linguistic task that is part of our everyday experience. Subjects watch a series of small short stories presented in a cartoon format on a computer screen and are asked to describe each of them right afterward. The task involves an intersection of different areas, among them two are immediately salient: the perceptual and the linguistic ones. The first one demands cognitive abilities for making sense of the visually perceived story. The second one involves the tension between being accurate to what has been perceived and stored in short term memory and particular characteristics of the means that a language put at the speaker disposal to represent those perceptual stimuli.

We pay particular attention to a (non accidental) coincidence. To make sense of the perceived story subjects need to segment the continuous flow of images. The segmentation cannot be arbitrary and, indeed, among other factors, the data shows that they look consistently for ?natural boundaries? of eventualities. Precisely, Spanish offers verbs to name those eventualities and, specifically, telic verbs ?Accomplishments and Achievements- that are naturally bounded or means to close States and Activities or open the telic ones. The three options are represented in (1) to (3) below, respectively.

 

(1)               Pedro fue a su casa.

?Pedro went home?

(2)               Pedro caminó hasta su casa.

?Pedro walked to his house?

(3)               Pedro fue hacia el frente.

?Pedro went toward the front?

 

PPs are in the domain of motion and spatial verbs the primary candidates to close or open an eventuality. The PP in (1) can be seen as expressing an oblique core argument; the verb is telic and the PP simply materializes its natural boundary. In contrast, the verb in (2) is an Activity and, hence, has no intrinsic boundary, rather, the PP introduces it. ?Caminar? is an Active-Accomplishment (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997: 111); the PP has changed the semantic type of the verb and, hence, needs to be analyzed as an argument-adjunct (predicative preposition) even if it is not obligatory. If this syntactic analysis is right, the same should be true of the PP in (3). ?Hacia el frente? opens up the event in the sense that for (3) to be true the Actor does not need to end up located at the goal (?el frente?). In addition to being required, the PP does change the basic semantic type of the verb Logical Structure and, hence, should be given an argument-adjunct status. As it has been thoroughly documented (among others, Verkuyl 1993; París 2007), lexical aspect is compositional and, as we have seen, in the domain of motion PPs have a fundamental role in that respect.

The considerations above are not just theoretical. The experimental data shows that speakers seem to need and make use of the whole set of tool that performs type shifts on lexical aspect.

 

(4)     ? va nadando hasta lo que sería la última puerta?

                             ?He is swimming to what would be the last door?

 

In this sentence, the speaker closed an Activity setting a natural boundary with a bounded Path introduced by a PP (?hasta la última puerta?). Interestingly, she then applied the progressive, an operator that denotes atelic eventualities, on that telic event description, shifting its type to atelic. Therefore, (4) means that the Actor is performing a swimming action that is supposed to end at the last door, assumption that the speaker makes either by guessing the intention of the Actor or based on the direction of the motion. Committing to a possible world is a speech act that the speakers should only perform if the contribution to make sense of the perceptual stimulus is worth the risk.

 

In this paper we aim at capturing the motivations and effects of processing a visual narrative scene with a whole range of combinations between Aktionarten, PPs and grammatical aspect. The data shows that Accomplishments are used with oblique core arguments expanded by relative clauses into longer PPs that reinforce the inherent telic properties of the lexical verb at the time the goal becomes more salient in the narrative, as seen in (5).

 

(5)           Llega a lo que sería la última puerta que va a cruzar antes de agarrar la pipa.

?He arrives to what seems to be the last door that is going to traverse before grabbing the pipe?

 

Conversely, PPs as argument adjunct with ?hacia? are also used to open up eventualities that are inherently telic, as can be seen in (6).

 

 (6)         Se tira hacia atrás adentro del agua.

                ?She jumps backward into the water?

 

                In summary, we analyze here several examples along the lines exposed so far and evaluate the underlying contextual situations that might lead speakers to perform type shifting operations while describing visually perceived short stories. The immediate goal is to identify the set of cognitive needs that motivate those operations while the long term objective is to find descriptive differences in the representation and processing of perceptual stimulus motivated in the characteristic of the particular language of the speaker. 

 

References:

 

París, L. 2007. ?Eventos e Intervalos en el Imperfecto, Pretérito y Progresivo?, Revista Signos 40 (65), págs. 609-632.

Suárez Cepeda, S. 2010. El efecto de los límites en la percepción y recuerdo de eventos. En  Castell, Víctor y Liliana Cubo (eds.) La renovación de la palabra en el bicentenario de la Argentina. Mendoza: Editorial FFyL, UnCuyo, 2010: disponible en http://mendoza-conicet.gob.ar/institutos/incihusa/ul/csal12/Castel_y_Cubo,_Editores_(2010).htm

Van Valin, Robert D. Jr. 2005. Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge: CUP.

Van Valin, Robert D. Jr y Randy LaPolla. 1997. Syntax. Structure, meaning and function. Cambridge: CUP.

Verkuyl, H. J. 1993. A theory of aspectuality. The interaction between temporal and atemporal structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press