CNL Lunch

Silvia Gennari

Building Temporal Relations On-Line

Thursday October 3rd, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

This talk deals with how we represent time, and what are the
consequences of this representation for how we process temporal adverbials. A series of experiments show that different event structures such as those characterizing events and states have different processing consequences for temporally locating adverbs. For eventive sentences, the larger the temporal distance between the current event and the reference time, the longer the time it takes to process the locating temporal adverbs. For stative sentences, temporal distance interacts with pragmatic assumptions that are characteristic of stative sentences. Overall, the result show that (a) event structure includes a internal temporal dimension that affects the way sentences are temporally related to others during processing, and (b) the representation of time in the mental model constructed during processing is isomorphic with the actual chronological order of events in the world.