Linguistic literature and reference texts consistently define the perfective aspect as encoding boundedness, where situations reach a temporal boundary and represent a completed action or successful completion.
The study employed a combination of a picture selection task and Visual World eye-tracking to investigate the processing of grammatical aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) in three languages: Russian, Spanish and English. In order to probe into the cognitive representations triggered by the aspectual forms we contrasted visual representations of different temporal portions of telic events—a snapshot of the process stage (ongoing event) and a snapshot of the immediate aftermath of the event/the result state (completed event). In all three languages, the gaze patterns and offline responses revealed a strong preference for representations of ongoing events in the imperfective condition. This confirms that the imperfective forms in all the three languages draw attention to the in-progress portion of a telic event. In the perfective condition, however, we found robust differences. Russian uses verbal prefixes to mark perfective aspect, and our results suggest that perfective telic verbs in Russian strongly highlight the result state of an event. In Spanish, the perfective past tense form (Preterite) also highlights event completion, but to a lesser extent than in Russian—in line with its less restrictive semantics in not requiring an inherent boundary. In contrast to Russian and Spanish, English speakers did not show a preference for representations of completed events in the perfective (Simple Past) condition. This suggests that the English Simple Past form does not encode a preferential cognitive salience for either the activity portion of an event or its result state, and lends support to the analysis of the English Simple Past as a non-aspectual tense form.
Semantically, viewpoint aspect encodes boundedness, the specification (or lack thereof) of a temporal boundary. Perfective viewpoint is bounded and situations presented in the perfective have reached the temporal boundary, whereas imperfective viewpoint is unbounded and situations presented in the imperfective have not. This semantic difference is reflected through the imperfective paradox interaction: telic predicates in the imperfective, but not those in the perfective, lose their completion entailments. Pragmatically, viewpoint aspect serves different discourse functions; the imperfective provides background information and it suspends the plot, whereas the perfective provides foreground information and it moves the plot along. This study examines Korean speakers" understanding of the aforementioned semantic and pragmatic properties of viewpoint aspect in English. Results showed successful acquisition of the pragmatics but delayed acquisition of the semantics. It is argued that this disparity is accounted for by transfer of partial completion construals of perfectives in Korean. It also addresses implications of the results in light of the Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis arguing for the vulnerability of the syntax-pragmatics interface as compared to the syntax-semantics interface.
... perfective aspect given in ( 22 ) involves the ... completed action ' , ' successful completion of an action ' or ' resultative meaning ' , among others . The fact that Slavic perfective verb forms in the non - past tense do not have ...
First published in 1999. This book examines the interplay between the semantics of noun phrases and verbal predicates, with an emphasis on data drawn from Czech and English, and comparisons to German and Finnish. This book will be of interest to a wide range of linguists concerned with aspect and how it interacts with lexical semantics, morphology, syntax and quantification.
... have ingressive meaning in the Perfective , e.g. tā gāo ' he is tall ' , tā gāo - le ( Pfv . ) ' he became tall ... completed action is its definition as being a resultative , i.e. indicating the successful completion of a ...
An introduction to verbal aspect as a general linguistic phenomenon, with examples primarily from English, Slavonic and Romance languages.
Using the Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) paradigm, this study investigated whether types of grammatical aspects and L2 proficiency influence embodied simulation during L2 sentence comprehension of English among Chinese learners. Participants judged the semantic plausibility of sentences in progressive or perfective aspect by performing directional actions (toward or away the body) that were either compatible or incompatible with the action direction described. Analysis of the reaction times (RTs) revealed a significant main effect of proficiency, with low-proficiency learners responding more slowly overall. Crucially, we observed a significant three-way interaction between aspect, action-sentence consistency, and proficiency. Simple effects analyses revealed a qualitative reversal: advanced learners exhibited a significant ACE only for sentences in the progressive aspect, indicating grammatically guided simulation sensitive to ongoing actions, whereas we found no ACE for perfective sentences, consistent with their focus on event completion rather than on-going action processes. In contrast, low-proficiency learners showed a significant ACE for the perfective aspect, suggesting a reliance on lexically triggered simulation, while they showed no simulation effect for the progressive aspect due to shallow morphosyntactic processing and L1 transfer. These findings support a proficiency-dependent dual-pathway model of L2 embodiment: advanced learners engage in direct mapping from grammar to simulation, whereas low-proficiency learners rely on an indirect, lexically mediated route. In summary, our findings demonstrate that the embodiment of grammatical meaning in L2 acquisition is not automatic, but is developmentally modulated, evolving from a lexically dependent to grammar-dependent simulation as proficiency increases. Furthermore, these results call for future research to explore the pedagogical applications of grammar-focused embodied instruction and to examine this dual-pathway model across other linguistic structures and L2 populations.
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