Constraints of lexical and grammatical aspect on event representations in Mandarin Chinese
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0020/000493Keywords:
constraints, lexical aspect, grammatical aspect, facilitation, MandarinAbstract
The current study addresses whether differential facilitation effects (dependent on lexical aspects) from perfectives and imperfectives observed in English and Cantonese would generalize to Mandarin Chinese by conducting a battery of offline and online experiments. The results indicated an across-the-board processing advantage of perfectives. Crucially, we found that the grammatical and lexical aspect interactively constrained the representation and processing of sentence processing in Mandarin. However, a robust facilitation emerged only for the perfective aspect when it co-occurred with accomplishment verbs but not for the imperfective aspect when it co-occurred with activity verbs.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
