Abstract
abstractTwo Dutch directional prepositions (i.e.,naarandrichting) provide a useful paradigm to study endpoint conceptualization. Experiment 1 adopted a sentence comprehension task and confirmed the linguistic proposal that, whennaarwas used in motion event descriptions, participants were more certain that the reference object was the goal of the agent than whenrichtingwas used. Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 used this linguistic pair to test the effect of two factors (i.e., the actor’s goal and the interlocutor’s status) on endpoint conceptualization via language production tasks. We found significant effects of both factors. First, participants chosenaarmore often when there was an inference in the referential situation that the reference object was the actor’s goal than when there was no such inference. Second, participants choserichtingmore often when they were told to describe the referential scenario to a police officer than to a friend. Participants were more cautious with their statements and were less willing to commit themselves to stating the goal of the agent when talking to a police officer than to a friend. The results are discussed in relation to relevant linguistic theories and event theories.
Highlights
Events are an important topic in the fields of cognitive psychology and linguistics
We present more details on the linguistic definition of directional prepositions, in comparison to that of grammatical aspect, to distinguish between grammatical aspect and directional prepositions concerning their role in event endpoint conceptualization
We present a clear picture of the semantic features of the two directional prepositions and provide a solid theoretical background for the hypotheses made in the current study
Summary
Much of the research on event cognition is embedded in the context of language comprehension studies. This is because language is a major way of presenting and talking about events in our daily life. Researchers have proposed that language comprehension is conceptualized as the construction of a coherent event model or situation model. Situation models are mental representations of a state of affairs described in texts Linguistic cues on both spatial and temporal relations among events described in texts contribute to the construction of situation models to achieve successful event comprehension (Johnson-Laird, 1983; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983; Zwaan, 2016; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)
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