Abstract
The present article provides evidence suggesting that general pragmatic accounts of orderliness in the temporal interpretation of VP coordination may be somewhat biased by the choice of typically script-based (con)sequential examples. Most of the discussion in the literature has been based on examples from a single language, mostly relying on the intuitions of the author(s) of the paper. On the basis of a cross-linguistic, empirical approach to language understanding, we have tested different language speakers’ preferred interpretation of the temporal relation holding in contextualized VP conjunctive sentences that are pragmatically not typically consequential or resultative. Under these conditions, our results show a preference for temporal overlap interpretations across languages. We also find that language-specific properties modify this general bias, thus supporting a competition-based account of relating form to meaning.
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- 1.
‘Be orderly’ is a submaxim of the maxim of manner. Linear ordering reflects temporal ordering (Grice 1975).
- 2.
Like Behrens, Fabricius-Hansen, and Frazier (2014), we use the term VP coordination/conjunction in a non-technical sense for cases where the second conjunct has no overt subject but “shares” the subject of the first conjunct. Technically speaking, what is conjoined may be functional projections of the verb, as in (5’) (see also Sect. 5.1).
- 3.
There are exceptions, though; see Fabricius-Hansen and Ramm (2008) for a general discussion and further references.
- 4.
Bohnemeyer and Swift (2004) use the term perfective rather than telic. However, since we include Czech in our study, which marks predicates grammatically/morphologically as perfective or imperfective, we find telicity a more appropriate term for the distinction between accomplishment and activity predicates.
- 5.
We use the terms S conjunction and clause conjunction interchangeably.
- 6.
See http://www.webexp.info/. We would like to thank Oliver Bott for his help in setting up this experiment.
- 7.
Note that lower numbers mean higher acceptability because of the acceptability scale.
- 8.
Adaptation in translation may have led to slight variations, since we want the texts to be as natural as possible in the individual languages.
- 9.
Some, if not all, our accomplishment predicates might in fact be considered semantically underdetermined, in principle allowing both a genuine (i.e., completed) accomplishment interpretation and an activity interpretation (leading up to but not reaching the culmination point), yet they are pragmatically strengthened to the former if nothing speaks against it (see Bott and Hamm 2014). As for Czech, both conjuncts had simplex imperfective verbs, which can only be interpreted as activities (see Sect. 1.2).
- 10.
For reasons of space and readability our illustrations here appear in English and German only.
- 11.
Note that the factor Language is not considered as a between-participants factor, but as a within-items factor. Duration is analyzed as repeated measures for both factors.
- 12.
There were not enough items in the ACT-ACT combinations to conduct a statistical analysis.
- 13.
- 14.
Technically speaking, the V2 position is mostly identified with C (the complementizer position) or viewed as a specific (finite) functional head (F) (see e.g., Sternefeld 2008 and Haider 2010). Thus C’, or FP, coordination might be a more precise term for our VP coordination, as far as German (and Norwegian) is concerned.
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Behrens, B., Mertins, B., Hemforth, B., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (2014). Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach. In: Hemforth, B., Mertins, B., Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds) Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05675-3_2
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