Abstract
Much of how we sequence events in speech mirrors the order of their natural occurrence. While event chains that conform to chronology may be easier to process, languages offer substantial freedom to manipulate temporal order. This article explores to what extent digressions from chronology are attributable to differences in grammatical aspect systems. We compared reverse order reports (RORs) in event descriptions elicited from native speakers of four languages, two with (Spanish, Modern Standard Arabic [MSA]) and two without grammatical aspect (German, Hungarian). In the Arabic group, all participants were highly competent MSA speakers from Palestine and Jordan. Standardized frequency counts showed significantly more RORs expressed by non-aspect groups than by aspect groups. Adherence to chronology changing as a function of contrast in grammatical aspect signal that languages without obligatory marking of ongoingness may provide more flexibility for event reordering. These findings bring novel insights about the dynamic interplay between language structure and temporal sequencing in the discourse stream.
Acknowledgements
Research reported in this article was funded in part from the ECF-2014-459 grant awarded to Norbert Vanek by the Leverhulme Trust. We would also like to thank for the help of language assistants during data collection, transcribing, translation, coding and disambiguation. We owe many thanks to Dima Al-Malahmeh, Fatma Said and Lior Laks on the Arabic end, Erzsébet Kulcsár and Aba Szöllősi on the Hungarian end, María Muradás-Taylor and Gonzalo Torres on the Spanish end, and Elaine Schmidt and Beatrice Szczepek Reed on the German end. Appreciation is also due to the Centre for Language Learning and Use at the University of York, who kindly supported the first author during the data collection stage with Hungarian participants and the during the subsequent writing-up stage. Elicitation of data from Arabic, German, and Spanish participants in this article was funded by a research grant of the German-Israeli Foundation for Research and Development 1-789-109.4/2003 awarded to Ruth Berman, Tel Aviv University, and Christiane von Stutterheim, University of Heidelberg.
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