Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

19.12. Clara McMahon (CUNY), Valeriia Modina (CUNY) & Dorota Klimek-Jankowska (Wrocław): Aspect, Negation, and the Visual World Paradigm: An investigation into Russian and Polish [zoom]

In Russian, an interaction between aspect and negation is reported in the theoretical semantics and pragmatics literature (Zinova & Filip, 2014a,b). When an imperfective verb is negated, the entire event is negated; however, when the perfective aspect is under negation in Russian, only a subpart of the event (the result) is denied as a result of pragmatic implicature. This study aims to investigate this hypothesized interaction using the Visual World Paradigm (VWP). We examine aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) and negation (affirmative vs. negated sentences) in Russian and Polish. This study additionally introduces a novel psycholinguistic task: a visual variant of a Likert scale. The visual Likert scale will display images corresponding to Ramchand (2008)’s syntactic decomposition of an event. Using a visual depiction of the full event structure will allow us to collect more fine-grained information in real-time about the interpretations of grammatical aspect, as well as about the processing of events more generally.