abstractTwo Dutch directional prepositions (i.e., naar and richting) provide a useful paradigm to study endpoint conceptualization. Experiment 1 adopted a sentence comprehension task and confirmed the linguistic proposal that, when naar was used in motion event descriptions, participants were more certain that the reference object was the goal of the agent than when richting was used. Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 used this linguistic pair to test the effect of two factors (i.e., the actor’s goal and the interlocutor’s status) on endpoint conceptualization via language production tasks. We found significant effects of both factors. First, participants chose naar more often when there was an inference in the referential situation that the reference object was the actor’s goal than when there was no such inference. Second, participants chose richting more often when they were told to describe the referential scenario to a police officer than to a friend. Participants were more cautious with their statements and were less willing to commit themselves to stating the goal of the agent when talking to a police officer than to a friend. The results are discussed in relation to relevant linguistic theories and event theories.

中文翻译：

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定向介词和事件端点概念化：荷兰语中的 naar 和 Richting 研究

摘要两个荷兰语方向介词（即，纳尔和里奇) 提供了一个有用的范例来研究端点概念化。实验 1 采用了一个句子理解任务，并确认了语言建议，即当纳尔在运动事件描述中使用时，参与者更确定参考对象是代理的目标，而不是当里奇被使用了。实验 2 和实验 3 使用这对语言来测试两个因素（即参与者的目标和对话者的状态）通过语言生产任务对端点概念化的影响。我们发现这两个因素都有显着影响。首先，参与者选择纳尔比没有这样的推论时，在引用情况下推断引用对象是参与者的目标时更常见。二、参与者选择里奇当他们被告知向警察描述参考场景而不是向朋友描述参考场景时。参与者对他们的陈述更加谨慎，并且在与警察交谈时更不愿意承诺陈述特工的目标而不是与朋友交谈。讨论结果与相关的语言理论和事件理论有关。