Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach

Abstract

International audienceThe 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