When we hear an event description, our mental construal is not only based on lexical items, but also on the message’s syntactic structure. This has been well-studied in the domains of causation, event participants, and object conceptualization. Less studied are the construals of temporality and numerosity as a function of syntax. We present a theory of how syntax affects the construal of event similarity and duration in a way that is systematically predictable from the interaction of mass/count syntax and verb semantics, and test these predictions in six studies. Punctive events in count syntax (give a kiss) and durative events in mass syntax (give advice) are construed as taking less time than in transitive frame (kiss and advise). Durative verbs in count syntax (give a talk), however, result in a semantic shift, orthogonal to duration estimates. These results demonstrate how syntactic and semantic structure together systematically affect event construal.

中文翻译：

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如果你想要一个快速的吻，让它重要：句法结构的选择如何影响事件解释

当我们听到一个事件描述时，我们的心理解释不仅基于词汇项，而且基于消息的句法结构。这已经在因果关系、事件参与者和对象概念化领域得到了很好的研究。研究较少的是作为句法函数的时间性和数量性的解释。我们提出了一种关于句法如何影响事件相似性和持续时间的解释的理论，这种方式可以从质量/计数句法和动词语义的相互作用中系统地预测出来，并在六项研究中测试这些预测。计数句法中的敲击事件（给出一个吻）和集体句法中的持续事件（给​​出建议）被解释为比传递框架（吻和建议）花费的时间更少。然而，计数句法中的持续动词（发表演讲）会导致语义转变，与持续时间估计正交。