Universität zu Köln

Graf, Tim, Philipp, Markus, Xu, Xiaonan, Kretzschmar, Franziska and Primus, Beatrice (2017). The interaction between telicity and agentivity: Experimental evidence from intransitive verbs in German and Chinese. Lingua, 200. S. 84 - 107. AMSTERDAM: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV. ISSN 1872-6135

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary, We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or intemal motion) is cross linguistically variable. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Graf, Tim UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Philipp, Markus UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Xu, Xiaonan UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Kretzschmar, Franziska UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Primus, Beatrice UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-209025
DOI:	10.1016/j.lingua.2017.08.006
Journal or Publication Title:	Lingua
Volume:	200
Page Range:	S. 84 - 107
Date:	2017
Publisher:	ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
Place of Publication:	AMSTERDAM
ISSN:	1872-6135
Language:	English
Faculty:	Unspecified
Divisions:	Unspecified
Subjects:	no entry
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language AUXILIARY SELECTION; LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION; MANDARIN CHINESE; DISTINCTION; INTEGRATION; KNOWLEDGE Multiple languages Linguistics; Language & Linguistics Multiple languages
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/20902