TY - JOUR
T1 - Prepositions and verb aspect in narrative understanding
AU - Morrow, Daniel G.
N1 - Funding Information:
The research was supported by predoctoral Grant 5 T32 MH 15860-03 and postdoctoral grant 1 F32 NS 07390-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The experiments are part of the author’s dissertation, which was completed at the University of California, Berkeley. I thank Eleanor Rosch for serving as the chairperson of my dissertation committee and for her help and encouragement. Stephen Palmer, Dan Slobin, and Charles Fillmore also served on the committee and provided many important suggestions and insights. I thank Ruth Kimchi and Steven Greenspan for their comments on the present version of the paper. Finally, I thank Herbert H. Clark for discussing issues related to the paper and especially for his patient assistance with several drafts of the paper.
PY - 1985/8
Y1 - 1985/8
N2 - The present study shows that prepositions and verb aspect help guide narrative comprehension by indicating the parts of motion events that are most prominent. They do this by specifying the movers' location, which determines what is most relevant to the mover's experience. In John walked past the living room into the kitchen, John is located in the kitchen, which therefore becomes more prominent than the living room, but, in John was walking past the living room to the kitchen, the living room is more prominent. Prominence was measured by seeing which part of the event was chosen as referent for a definite noun phrase in a following sentence such as He noticed the room was dark. Four experiments showed that prominence was determined more by prepositions and verb aspect than by the order of mention of the source, path, or goal rooms. The experiments show that grammatical categories that are important for conveying event structure are also critical for indicating what readers should focus on in order to construct a mental model of the scenes and events described by the narrative.
AB - The present study shows that prepositions and verb aspect help guide narrative comprehension by indicating the parts of motion events that are most prominent. They do this by specifying the movers' location, which determines what is most relevant to the mover's experience. In John walked past the living room into the kitchen, John is located in the kitchen, which therefore becomes more prominent than the living room, but, in John was walking past the living room to the kitchen, the living room is more prominent. Prominence was measured by seeing which part of the event was chosen as referent for a definite noun phrase in a following sentence such as He noticed the room was dark. Four experiments showed that prominence was determined more by prepositions and verb aspect than by the order of mention of the source, path, or goal rooms. The experiments show that grammatical categories that are important for conveying event structure are also critical for indicating what readers should focus on in order to construct a mental model of the scenes and events described by the narrative.
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U2 - 10.1016/0749-596X(85)90036-1
DO - 10.1016/0749-596X(85)90036-1
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0001296305
SN - 0749-596X
VL - 24
SP - 390
EP - 404
JO - Journal of Memory and Language
JF - Journal of Memory and Language
IS - 4
ER -