From event sequence to grammar

Pawley, Andrew; Lane, Jonathan

doi:10.1075/tsl.38.13paw

Cited by 21 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…In language, one can easily describe changes in dimensions, including goals (“Barney decided to stop at the grocery store.”), causes (“The melting ice cream stained Delia’s car seat.”), and temporal relations (“The rain started just as Kim’s bus arrived.”) Language has numerous sentence-level devices for representing relations among events. These include phrase and clause structure, verb chaining (e.g., Pawley & Lane, 1998), and verb tense and aspect (e.g., Moens & Steedman, 1988; Pustejovsky, 1991). The structure of these devices can provide important information about humans’ conceptual representation of events.…”

Section: Language Understanding and Discourse Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segmentation in reading and film comprehension.

Zacks

Speer

Reynolds

2009

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

291

352

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When reading a story or watching a film, comprehenders construct a series of representations in order to understand the events depicted. Discourse comprehension theories and a recent theory of perceptual event segmentation both suggest that comprehenders monitor situational features such as characters' goals, to update these representations at natural boundaries in activity. However, the converging predictions of these theories had previously not been tested directly. Two studies provided evidence that changes in situational features such as characters, their locations, their interactions with objects, and their goals are related to the segmentation of events in both narrative texts and films. A 3rd study indicated that clauses with event boundaries are read more slowly than are other clauses and that changes in situational features partially mediate this relation. A final study suggested that the predictability of incoming information influences reading rate and possibly event segmentation. Taken together, these results suggest that processing situational changes during comprehension is an important determinant of how one segments ongoing activity into events and that this segmentation is related to the control of processing during reading.

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Section: Language Understanding and Discourse Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segmentation in reading and film comprehension.

Zacks

Speer

Reynolds

2009

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

291

352

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…More generally, the literature on event representation and the segmentation of causal chains reports language-specific differences in the detail in which sub-events are habitually expressed (e.g., Bohnemeyer et al, 2007Bohnemeyer et al, , 2011Bohnemeyer & Pederson, 2010;van Staden & Reesink, 2008). A tendency to distribute information is commonly reported for Papuan languages among others and has been extensively discussed in studies on verb serialization (e.g., De Vries, 2005;Heeschen, 1998;Pawley, 1987;Pawley & Lane, 1998). Beyond the existence of such grammaticalized constructions, we also observe the tendency of distributing meaning components across several utterances (sometimes even produced by different speakers, engaged in coproducing the description of an event) as more general discourse patterns and reflecting speakers' preferences in how to describe such events.…”

Section: Patterns In the Conflation And Distribution Of Semantic Comp...mentioning

confidence: 95%

Bringing and taking

Hellwig

Margetts

Riesberg

et al. 2022

Typological Studies in Language

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This chapter proposes a typology of expressions of directed caused accompanied motion (directed CAM): it introduces and defines this semantic domain, presents the corpus-based methodology used by the authors of this volume, and gives an overview of the results. It shows that directed CAM expressions tend to be morphosyntactically complex and it identifies four distinct patterns based on the lexical core of the expression: first, with a directed CAM verb; second, with an intransitive motion verb; third, with a transitive verb of accompaniment or of caused (accompanied) motion; or fourth, with a combination of the second and the third options. The chapter discusses each pattern and addresses issues of universality and variability in the domain of directed CAM.

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“…This phenomenon and issues arising from it have been extensively discussed in the literature on verb serialisation (e.g. Ameka & Essegbey 2013;Defina 2016;Pawley 1987;Pawley & Lane 1998;Schaefer 1997). However, this tendency is not restricted to serializing languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-linguistic patterns in the lexicalisation of bring and take

Margetts

Haude²,

Himmelmann

et al. 2022

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This study investigates the linguistic expression of bring and take events and more generally of the semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion (‘directed CAM’) across a sample of eight languages of the Pacific and the Americas. Unlike English, the majority of languages in our sample do not lexicalise directed CAM events by simple verbs, but rather encode the defining meaning components – caused motion, accompaniment, and directedness – in morphosyntactically complex constructions. The study shows a high degree of crosslinguistic diversity, even among closely related languages. Meaning components are contributed to directed CAM expressions by a mix of lexical semantics, morphosyntax, and pragmatic means. The study proposes a text-based, semantic typology of directed CAM events by drawing on corpus data from endangered languages.

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From event sequence to grammar

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Segmentation in reading and film comprehension.

Segmentation in reading and film comprehension.

Bringing and taking

Cross-linguistic patterns in the lexicalisation of bring and take

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