grammatical aspect, processing, coercion, ERP study, Polish

What is it about?

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the limits of tacit aspectual adjustment operations (the so-called coercion) in Polish as a language with a rich overt aspectual morphology. Following the standard definition of coercion according to which " coercion is triggered if there is a conflict between the aspectual character of the eventuality description and the aspectual constraints of some other element in the context " and " [t]he felicity of an aspectual reinterpretation is strongly dependent on linguistic context and knowledge of the world " (de Swart 1998: 360), we created contexts with two kinds of mismatches, i.e., morphological and semantic/pragmatic conflicts, which should potentially give rise to coercion. These contexts involving converbs, simultaneous and anterior, served as the basis for two online acceptability rating questionnaires as well as an Event Related Potentials (ERP) study. Our initial expectation was that perfective aspect in Polish due to its semantic and morphological markedness will considerably constrain coercion. In contrast, imperfective aspect in Polish as being semantically and morphologically unmarked should potentially allow for coercion. In contexts with a word-internal morphological clash between the aspectual requirements of a converbial morpheme and the aspectual form of a verbal stem we found no evidence for coercion. Such mismatches are clearly processed as morpho-syntactic violations. In contexts involving a conflict between the semantic/pragmatic selectional requirements of converbs (i.e., temporally anchored participial clauses functioning in a sentence as adverbial modifiers) and the aspectual properties of a main clause eventuality instead of the expected coercion we found experimental evidence proving the psychological reality of semantically based morphological blocking (understood as a competition between two potentially possible forms in which the form which is more specific/informative (here: the perfective one) blocks the use of the less specific form (here: the imperfective one). Ours results differ from the experimental findings of previous studies which were conducted mainly in languages with less articulated aspectual morphology.

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Why is it important?

We provide new experimental evidence pointing to the conclusion that any discussion on the process of aspectual interpretation should take into account the semantics of overt aspectual operators supplemented with tacit adjustments (coercion) and possible blocking effects (resulting from the existence of a competition between two forms).