Event

Ugurcan Vurgun's dissertation, "From words to worlds: Telicity and the malleability of event representations" will be defended on Friday August 30th at 11:00am EDT, in the Linguistics department library and on Zoom.

The abstract is below:

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Title: From Words to Worlds: Telicity and the Malleability of Event Representations

Supervisor: Anna Papafragou

Committee: Florian Schwarz, Katie Schuler

Aspect as a grammatical category conveys information about the temporal structure and boundaries of events. For example, the sentence “John ran one mile” is telic, as it describes an event with a clear endpoint, while “John ran” is atelic, because it does not specify an inherent boundary. This linguistic distinction has been hypothesized to connect with cognitive representations of bounded and unbounded events, respectively, in event cognition: bounded events are conceived as having clear start and end points, while unbounded events are conceptualized without definite boundaries. However, the precise nature of the correspondence between linguistic telicity and cognitive boundedness, and its implications for event processing, have remained elusive. 

The first study (Chapter 1) introduces a novel interruption detection task to investigate how processing telic versus atelic sentences correlates with the apprehension of visual events. This work provides compelling evidence of a strong relationship between linguistic framing and event construals, highlighting the role of telicity in event apprehension. 

Building on this paradigm, the second study (Chapter 2) applies the same method to investigate aspectual coercion. This research challenges previous assumptions about aspectual coercion, offering new insights into how the mind processes conflicts between lexical aspect and contextual cues. The findings suggest that coercion does not necessarily lead to shifts in aspectual commitments as previously thought, revealing a more complex interaction between different linguistic elements in aspect computation. 

Finally, the last study (Chapter 3) explores the cognitive foundations of telicity through another novel experimental paradigm combining sentence comprehension and event viii categorization. This work reveals significant parallels between linguistic aspect and event cognition while uncovering complexities in this relationship, particularly in how telic and atelic sentences are processed with and without adverbial modifiers and in cases of aspectual coercion. 

Key themes emerge across these studies: the correspondence between telicity and event construals and the complexity of aspectual computation. This research advances our understanding of the relationship between language and event cognition, revealing both the malleability and stability of event representations. The innovative experimental paradigms introduced in this dissertation offer new tools for investigating the language-cognition interface.