ALESSANDRA CECILIA RAMPININI
TESIDI LAUREA
Corso di Laurea Magistrale in LINGUISTICA Dipartimento di Linguistica T. Bolelli, Università di Pisa
Nous n'atteignons jamais l'homme séparé du langage et nous ne le voyons jamais l'inventant. Nous n'atteignons jamais l'homme réduit à lui-même et s'ingéniant à concevoir l'existence de l'autre. C'est un homme parlant que nous trouvons dans le monde, un homme parlant à un autre homme, et le langage enseigne la définition même de l'homme.
Abstract
Telicity is a semantic property encased in event structure, describing events endowed with a natural endpoint: to die, arrive, leave and similar predicates are telic, whereas to run, swim and similar predicates are atelic (Vendler, 1957; Comrie, 1976; Bertinetto, 1986). Telicity can be either construal, i.e. determined by phrase structure (“to run a mile”), or inherent in the lexeme itself (“to die”). In Role and Reference Grammar (RRG: Foley & Van Valin, 1984, etc.), telicity is represented in the logical structure (LS) of predicates as leading to a c h a n g e i n t h e s t a t e o f t h e d i r e c t i n t e r n a l a r g u m e n t . is thesis examined the general hypothesis that telicity is represented in cognition, thus leading to priming effects in a covert semantic judgement task: we report a behavioral pilot study conducted on 35 Italian native subjects. e experiment was conducted on 20 subjects (experiment 1) and then repeated on 15 more subjects (experiment 1.a). Subjects saw pairs of words presented visually: the cue was an Italian in finitive (telic/atelic) or a control string (“xxxxx”) which remained available for 800ms (Stymulus Onset Asynchrony, SOA); the target was an Italian verb form (telic/atelic) inflected in first or third person singular. Subjects had to respond on inflection, pressing either 1 on a computer keyboard if the verb was in flected in first person, or 3 if it was inflected in third person. e Person variable was functional to our purpose of covertly assessing the e ffect of verb meaning in a priming protocol and differentiates our study from the reported body of literature on verb semantics and priming. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was performed on our experimental variables and their i n t e r a c t i o n s : C u e ( t e l i c , a t e l i c , c o n t r o l ) , Ta r g e t ( t e l i c , a t e l i c ) , Pe r s o n ( firs t , thi rd ) . Results show a main cue effect: telic cues yielded faster reaction times than atelic cues and control cues; a main person effect: first person targets yielded faster reaction times than third person targets; an interaction between c u e a n d pe r s on : re a c ti o n t i m es f o r t el i c c u e s a nd first person targets were faster overall. As regards the Cue e ffect, shorter reaction times for telic cues remained highly signi ficant across measurements: in post-hoc analysis, Bonferroni's correction on mean reaction times showed a tendency for telic cues being faster than atelic cues (p=0.0185), and signi ficantly faster than control cues (p<0.0001); likewise, we observed a significant difference for telic cues on median reaction times which remained significant after Bonferroni's correction: telic cues were signi ficantly faster than atelic cues (p=0.0098) and c o n t r o l c u e s ( p = 0 . 0 0 3 7 ) .
As regards the Person effect, we argue that first person is easier to process due to being the form in which the speaker posits himself as a “subject” (“"Ego" is he who says –ego–“ Benveniste, 1966, p.224) at the Langue level, whereas “we must bear in mind that the third person is the form of the verbal (or pronominal) paradigm that does not refer to a person because it refers to an object located outside direct address” (Benveniste, 1966, p.229); moreover, in Italian the first person is also the citation form for verbs so that, in this sense, it is unmarked in comparison to the third person. As regards the interaction between first person and telic cue, on the grounds of what we have just argued based on Benveniste's theory of person relationships in language, we propose that telicity is easier to represent when involving subjectivity ( first person) rather than a referent located outside direct address and not necessarily linked to a person in a strict sense (third person).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrea Leo from the Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Laboratory at St. Chiara University Hospital in Pisa for helping me program the experiment; my gratitude also goes to Chiara Renzi from the Cognition Psychology Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Pavia, for helping me with data analysis and for her useful insights. I would then like to thank all the people who volunteered in the experiment and those who helped finding them. Lastly, my gratitude goes to my advisers for their trust in my work.
Even though they were not directly involved in my thesis, I would very much like to thank some of the people I have had the chance and the luck to meet over my years in the Department of Linguistics “T. Bolelli”, University of Pisa. First of all, my gratitude goes to Giovanna Marotta and Florida Nicolai for their lessons in method: their example made a more observant and (hopefully) thoughtful person out me. I would then like to thank Giuseppe Dell'Agata for welcoming me warmly and enthusiastically into the world of Slavic languages, for the afternoons spent on manuscripts and vocabularies, for his abiding belief in my knowledge of the ancient Greek language: those awaited digressions kept my mind flexible and my spirit lively. Last, I would like to thank Romano Lazzeroni for teaching me to be fearless when facing questions and the answers they demand, and for the clarity of the epiphanies he is able to induce in me.
Lastly, here are some very last and very heartfelt acknowledgements I need to address. To my dear friend Cristiana Sigona, who was so lovely to take my graduation paperwork where I asked her to, in one of the most unfortunate and quite frankly tragicomical weeks of my five-year university time: if I am here today, defending this thesis, it is also thanks to her. To my mother, for allowing me to pursue my dreams and for her positive certainty that I will do something with my life, even in the darkest of hours; to my awesome brother, for being awesome just like that; to my grandparents for asking me “so what is it that you study again?” every other day; to my family, which extends well beyond the boundaries of blood-relatedness – who is involved in this statement will know instantly what I mean –; and lastly to my friends, who just seem to be ridiculously and astonishingly permanent in this mess of a life and for keeping up with me being the weird, nerdy lassie I am.
Table of Contents
1. Telicity ...1
1.1 Theoretical background: RRG...2
1.2 The actor –– undergoer hierarchy...3
1.3 Layered Structure of the Clause ...6
1.4 Vendler’s verb classification...8
1.5 Historical background on Vendler's work: Aristotle and Ryle...10
1.6 Accomplishments and achievements...11
1.7 Logical Structure of a telic event ...12
1.8 Morphosyntactic manifestations of telic features...13
2. Telicity and neurocognitive correlates of Language...18
2.1 Telicity: linguistic and cognitive category?...18
2.2 Telicity in a Generative Grammar framework ...19
3. Priming Telicity in the Healthy Brain – State of the Art ...21
3.1 A first experiment on priming and event types...22
3.2 Priming on event types with word and picture stimuli...25
3.3 Semantic priming study of Russian aspect and resultativity...30
3.4 A recent fMRI study on the neural correlates of Telicity...36
4. The present research...40
5. Conclusions and future research ...55
Appendix A (codex)...i
Appendix B (tables for experiment 1) ...xv
