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Factors Motivating Use of Grammatical Aspect

Fedder, Joshua C.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343403334

Abstract Details

2012, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Psychology.
Grammatical aspect defines the viewpoint that individuals take on events. Two forms of grammatical aspect are perfective and imperfective aspect. Perfective aspect presents an event as complete and focuses on the endpoint of the event. Imperfective aspect presents an event as in progress, and does not present the event with its endpoint. The goal of the present study is to determine what types of information about an event will lead subjects to describe an event with a perfective, complete view of the event, and what types of information about an event will lead subjects to describe an event with an imperfective, ongoing view of the event. We tested 130 adult subjects on the influence of three types of cues to grammatical aspect by having them complete single sentences in a forced-choice fill in the blank morphology selection task. The first cue was a temporal-linguistic cue telicity, which specifies whether or not an event has a natural endpoint. We hypothesized that atelic predicates would lead to greater selection of imperfective aspect, while telic predicates would lead to greater selection of perfective aspect. The second set of cues were knowledge-based semantic cues, and included subject animacy, presence/absence of a patient introduced using transitive/intransitive structure, and presence/absence of locative information. Here we hypothesized that sentences with animate subjects, no patients, and locative information would lead to selection of imperfective aspect, while sentences with inanimate subjects, patients, and no locative information would lead to selection of perfective aspect. The third set of cues were discourse cues, which were presence of a narrative introduction to each sentence, and the order in which locative information was presented. We hypothesized that a narrative introduction, as well as locative information presented at the beginning of a sentence, would lead to greater selection of imperfective aspect. An ANOVA on morphology choice as well as a binary logistic regression revealed that all cues influenced aspectual choice in the expected direction, except for the presence of a narrative introduction, and that fronted locative information and transitive/intransitive structure were the strongest predictors of aspectual choice. We also performed a corpus analysis using the Corpus of Contemporary American English to assess how our experimental results relate to frequency data. We found that frequency data accounted for our findings in regards to animate/inanimate subjects as well as transitive/intransitive structure, but not for locative information.
Laura Wagner, PhD (Advisor)
Shari Speer, PhD (Committee Member)
Simon Dennis, PhD (Committee Member)
Psychology
grammatical aspect; world knowledge; discourse; telicity; language; psychology

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Fedder, J. C. (2012). Factors Motivating Use of Grammatical Aspect [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343403334

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Fedder, Joshua. Factors Motivating Use of Grammatical Aspect. 2012. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343403334.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Fedder, Joshua. "Factors Motivating Use of Grammatical Aspect." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343403334

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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© 2012, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.