How Cross‐Linguistic Differences in the Grammaticalization of Future Time Reference Influence Intertemporal Choices

Thomä, Dieter; Tytus, Agnieszka Ewa

doi:10.1111/cogs.12525

Cited by 20 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Chen, Cronqvist, Ni, & Zhang, 2017;Chi, Su, Tang, & Xu, 2018;Fasan, Gotti, Kang, & Liu, 2016;Figlio, Giuliano, Özek, & Sapienza, 2016;Galor, Özak, & Sarid, 2016;Guin, 2017;Hübner & Vannoorenberghe, 2015a;Karapandza, 2016;Kim, Kim, & Zhou, 2017;Liang, Marquis, Renneboog, & Sun, 2018;?, ? ;Mavisakalyan, Tarverdi, & Weber, 2018;Pérez & Tavits, 2017;Roberts, Winters, & Chen, 2015;Sutter, Angerer, Glätzle-rützler, & Lergetporer, 2015;Thoma & Tytus, 2018). The suggestion is that speakers of languages with strict future tenses might be less future-orientated because increased grammatical marking of FTR would cause them to discount value as a function of time to a greater degree than do speakers of languages which do not mark FTR (K. Chen, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Robertson¹,

Roberts²

2020

Preprint

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Recently, economists have used notions of linguistic relativity to suggest that grammatical constraints on Future Time Reference (FTR) affect whether people choose to take a small reward now or wait until later for a larger reward ("temporal discounting"). Economists hypothesize that habitual use of present tense constructions for FTR may cause speakers to perceive future rewards as temporally closer, and thereby as more valuable. This approach assumes that future tenses primarily encode when an event happens, which overlooks their widespread tendency to encode modal notions of probability. It additionally overlooks the importance of modal expressions in FTR. Since people discount value as a function of both temporal distance and the probability of a reward being received, it is important to understand what different FTR tenses actually encode, as well as cross-linguistic differences in the grammaticization of modality. We therefore modified the EUROTYP questionnaire to elicit future tense as well as modal FTR constructions across a range of temporal distances and probabilities for speakers of English, Dutch, and German. We find that in English tense and probability are more strictly grammaticized than in Dutch or German, and that increasing temporal distance from speaker "now" tended to cause English and German – but not Dutch – speakers to use more uncertain terms. These results highlight the importance of modality for typological linguists working on FTR, and suggest economists working on linguistic relativity and psychological discounting should consider cross-linguistic differences in the grammaticization of modality and in the modal semantics of future tenses.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Robertson¹,

Roberts²

2020

Preprint

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“…Although a formal classification of grammaticalization of FTR constitutes an initial reference point when designing cross-linguistic experiments, different classifications do exist, from dichotomizing FTR (e.g., high vs. low FTR; see Chen, 2013) to defining FTR as a continuous variable (e.g., differentiating between high and low FTR based on topographical features of languages; see Thoma & Tytus, 2018). Importantly, we would argue that these boundaries are not precise, as the classification of some languages have been controversial (see, for example, Radford, 1997 for further discussion on English).…”

Section: Linguistic Realizations Of the Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, temporal discounting has even been proposed as a potential behavioral marker for addiction (Bickel et al, 2014), as those suffering from diverse addictions have been shown to prefer short-term over long-term rewards than those without any addiction (Bickel et al, 2007), except for coffee addiction ( Jarmolowicz et al, 2015). Thoma and Tytus (2018) adapted the temporal discounting paradigm to investigate the effect of the grammaticalization of the future on perceiving future outcomes. Unlike previous studies, they operationalized FTR strength as a continuous variable and examined five languages ranging from a low degree of FTR to a high degree of FTR (in increasing FTR order: Chinese, German, Danish, Spanish, English).…”

Section: Temporal Discountingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are no clear criteria to identify languages with a high degree of FTR: some studies categorize periphrastic future constructions as a high degree of FTR (e.g., Dahl & Velupillai, 2013;Galor et al, 2018), whereas other studies use the general marking of the verb tense to characterize a high degree of FTR (e.g., Chen, 2013;Kim & Filimonau, 2017;Mavisakalyan et al, 2018). Future research may consider grammaticalization of the future as a continuum (e.g., Thoma & Tytus, 2018) and adapt the categorization of the degree of FTR to suit a specific research question.…”

Section: Conclusion and Propositions For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Psychological Impact of Different Grammaticalizations of the Future

Jäggi

Sato

Gillioz

et al. 2020

Journal of Cognition

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Considering how fundamental and ubiquitous temporal information is in discourse (e.g., Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998), it seems rather surprising that the impact of the grammaticalization of the future on the way we perceive the future has only been scarcely studied. We argue that this may be due to its rather abstract nature and how it has been previously operationalized. In this review, we lay the foundation for studying the impact of the grammaticalization of the future on mental representations of the future by taking an interdisciplinary perspective, connecting cognitive sciences, linguistics, psycholinguistics, economics, and health psychology. More specifically, we argue that experimental psycholinguistics, combined with more applied domains, constitute a promising research avenue.

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“…The space of results should tell us more than simply that the first paper was flawed: it suggests that collapsing information within languages loses some important aspects of the data, and that all three of the historical processes are at play in human cultural evolution (see also Moran et al, 2012 ). Furthermore, the ultimate suggestion of the paper was that large-scale, cross-cultural statistics was not the best approach for addressing this question due to the complexities of the confounding factors, and instead future research should concentrate on localized experiments, which are quite feasible in this case (Thoma and Tytus, 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation

Roberts

2018

Front. Psychol.

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This paper discusses the maximum robustness approach for studying cases of adaptation in language. We live in an age where we have more data on more languages than ever before, and more data to link it with from other domains. This should make it easier to test hypotheses involving adaptation, and also to spot new patterns that might be explained by adaptation. However, there is not much discussion of the overall approach to research in this area. There are outstanding questions about how to formalize theories, what the criteria are for directing research and how to integrate results from different methods into a clear assessment of a hypothesis. This paper addresses some of those issues by suggesting an approach which is causal, incremental and robust. It illustrates the approach with reference to a recent claim that dry environments select against the use of precise contrasts in pitch. Study 1 replicates a previous analysis of the link between humidity and lexical tone with an alternative dataset and finds that it is not robust. Study 2 performs an analysis with a continuous measure of tone and finds no significant correlation. Study 3 addresses a more recent analysis of the link between humidity and vowel use and finds that it is robust, though the effect size is small and the robustness of the measurement of vowel use is low. Methodological robustness of the general theory is addressed by suggesting additional approaches including iterated learning, a historical case study, corpus studies, and studying individual speech.

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How Cross‐Linguistic Differences in the Grammaticalization of Future Time Reference Influence Intertemporal Choices

Cited by 20 publications

References 51 publications

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

Not when but if: Modality and future time reference in English, Dutch and German

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Psychological Impact of Different Grammaticalizations of the Future

Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation

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