Grammatical aspect, gesture, and conceptualization: Using co-speech gesture to reveal event representations
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Fey Parrill
,
Benjamin K. Bergen
Abstract
Grammatical aspect is a pervasive linguistic device that, according to linguistic analyses, allows speakers to encode different ways of construing events. For instance, the progressive (I was writing a book) is thought to reflect increased focus on the internal details of an event, as contrasted with the perfect (I had written a book). However, experimental evidence that speakers describing events using progressive versus non-progressive aspect are in fact thinking about the same events differently is lacking. We used co-speech gesture as a means to investigate what speakers' event representations are like when they produce progressive versus non-progressive utterances. We found that progressive event descriptions were accompanied by longer-lasting and more complex gestures, but only when participants described events originally presented to them in the progressive. This evidence suggests that people are actually construing events differently when they use different grammatical aspects, but that the aspect originally used to encode the events plays a role as well.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Subject auxiliary inversion and linguistic generalization: Evidence for functional/cognitive motivation in language
- How linguistic structure influences and helps to predict metaphoric meaning
- Salience and construal in the use of synonymy: A study of two sets of near-synonymous nouns
- Language processing and the evolution of rhythmic patterns: Asymmetries in binary stress systems
- Grammatical aspect, gesture, and conceptualization: Using co-speech gesture to reveal event representations
- You can't cry your way to candy: Motion events and paths in the x's way construction
