Temporal connectives and verbal tenses as processing instructions

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to enhance our understanding about the processing of implicit and explicit temporal chronological relations by investigating the roles of temporal connectives and verbal tenses, separately and in interaction. In particular, we investigate how two temporal connectives (ensuite and puis, both meaning ‘then’) and two verbal tenses expressing past time (the simple and compound past) act as processing instructions for chronological relations in French. Theoretical studies have suggested that the simple past encodes the instruction to relate events sequentially, unlike the more flexible compound past, which does not. Using an online experiment with a self-paced reading task, we show that these temporal connectives facilitate the processing of chronological relations when they are expressed with both verbal tenses, and that no significant difference is found between the two verbal tenses, nor between the two connectives. By means of an offline experiment with an evaluation task, we find, contrary to previous studies, that comprehenders prefer chronological relations to be overtly marked rather than implicitly expressed, and prefer to use the connective puis in particular. Furthermore, comprehenders prefer it when these relations are expressed using the compound past, rather than the simple past. Instead of using the continuity hypothesis (Segal et al. 1991, Murray 1997) to explain the processing of temporal relations, we conclude that a more accurate explanation considers a cluster of factors including linguistic knowledge (connectives, tenses, grammatical and lexical aspect) and world knowledge.

Temporal Relations at the Sentence and Text Genre Level: The Role of Linguistic Cueing and Non-linguistic Biases—An Annotation Study of a Bilingual Corpus

“…In sum, up to now existing experimental and empirical studies focusing on individual verb tenses showed the following: (1) both the French Passé Simple et Passé Composé trigger more frequently chronological than synchronous relations (Grisot, 2017;Grisot & Blochowiak, 2019), (2) the French Imparfait signals more frequently synchronous than chronological relations (Grisot, 2017), (3) the English Simple Past was found either to signal equally frequently chronological and synchronous relations (Grisot, 2017) or to trigger more frequently chronological than synchronous relations (Feller et al 2019;Madden & Zwaan, 2003;Magliano & Schleich, 2000;Author1, under review), and (4) the English Past Progressive was found either to trigger equally frequently chronological and synchronous relations (Madden & Zwaan, 2003;Author1, under review) or to trigger more frequently chronological than synchronous relations (Feller et al 2019;Magliano & Schleich, 2000). These results are insufficient to understand the role of verb tenses for temporal relations because they show neither a monolingual not cross-linguistic comprehensive picture of all verb tenses and because they seem to be contradictory.…”

“…As for French, Grisot and Blochowiak (2019) investigate the role of French verb tenses and of the presence and absence of temporal connectives, separately and in interaction, as processing instructions for chronological relations in French, by means of a self-paced reading experiment and an offline evaluation experiment. They test how two past time verb tenses (the Passsé Simple and the Passé Composé) and the presence and absence of two specialized connectives (puis 'then' and ensuite 'then') influence the processing and acceptability of short narrative contexts.…”

“…Britton et al 1982;Deaton & Gernsbacher, 1997;Haberland, 1982; for causal relations). For temporal relations, Grisot and Blochowiak's (2019) reading data showed that the specialized connectives puis and ensuite facilitated the processing of chronological relations, by comparison with contexts where the relation is left implicit. Their acceptability task experiment also revealed that comprehenders preferred chronological relations to be overtly marked rather than left implicit.…”

“…Where Grice's maxim, Horn's principles and the UID hypothesis initially refers to production, Demberg (2012, 2015) related production tendencies to comprehension biases and showed that corpus-based patterns provide support for the expectation hypothesis (Langacker, 2000) (cf. also Grisot & Blochowiak, 2019). Demberg (2012: 2671) then formulated the implicitness assumption, according to which the implicitness of the discourse connective is "a sign of expectation of the discourse relation: if readers have a default preference to infer a specific relation in the text, this type of relation should appear without explicit markers."…”

“…In contrast, the French Passé Simple should signal almost exclusively chronological relations. Referentially nonautonomous and imperfective verb tenses are expected to signal synchronous Overtly marked chronological relations are processed faster than implicit ones (Grisot & Blochowiak, 2019) Chronological relations are more frequently overtly marked…”