Speaker: Elena Marx (Harvard / CEU)
Title: Mapping event structure onto temporal structure during language comprehension
Abstract: In a sentence like The girl fed the rabbit that hopped to the fence, what happened first? Did the girl feed the rabbit before or after it hopped to the fence? Given that linguistic descriptions often lack explicit information about the sequential order between situations, the question is: what factors determine how complex temporal structures are mapped onto linguistic form?
Previous research has focused on the influence of linguistic factors in explaining interpretations of temporal order (e.g., pragmatics, syntax). However, the way in which event cognition interacts with language to affect temporal construal is an empirically open question. In my talk, I will present a series of studies, using different experimental methods (i.e., sentence-matching task, act-out task, forced-choice task) and linguistic contexts (i.e., relative clauses, discourse narrative), to show that temporal order is interpreted as a function of the event structural encoding: States tend to be interpreted as backgrounds, and further back in time as events.
Overall, our studies shed light on how people comprehend the temporal structure of complex situations from language; how event structure and linguistic structure map onto each other; and link research on linguistic representation more broadly to event construal.