Abstract
Psycholinguistic approaches that study the effects of language on mental representations have ignored a potential role of the grammaticalization of the future (i.e., how the future manifests linguistically). We argue that the grammaticalization of the future may be an important aspect, as thinking about the future is omnipresent in our everyday life. The aim of this study was to experimentally manipulate the degree of future time references (i.e., present and future verb tense and temporal adverbials) to address their impact on the perceived location of future events. Across four experiments, two in French and two in German, no effect was found, irrespective of our verb and adverbial manipulations, and contrary to our hypotheses. Bayes factors confirmed that our null effects were not due to a lack of power. We present one of the first empirical accounts investigating the role of the grammaticalization of the future on effects of mental representations. We discuss possible reasons for these null results and illustrate further avenues for future research.
Highlights
Languages are built with grammatical structures, such as grammatical gender [1] or grammatical aspect [2, 3]
We examine the impact of the grammaticalization of the future, that is, the grammatical manifestations of how to refer to the future, and how these grammaticalizations may impact our representations of future events
This approach differs from other experimental studies within the field of future time reference and temporal discounting [14, 15], in that we try to unravel the possible underlying cognitive processes involved from a psycholinguistic perspective, as delineated in our previous theoretical work [16]
Summary
Languages are built with grammatical structures, such as grammatical gender [1] or grammatical aspect [2, 3]. We examine the impact of the grammaticalization of the future, that is, the grammatical manifestations of how to refer to the future, and how these grammaticalizations may impact our representations of future events. This approach differs from other experimental studies within the field of future time reference and temporal discounting [14, 15], in that we try to unravel the possible underlying cognitive processes involved from a psycholinguistic perspective, as delineated in our previous theoretical work [16].
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