Languages (Oct 2024)
Dead or Alive: A Lifetime Effect of Pomak Nominal Tense in a Self-Paced Reading Experiment
Abstract
Nominal tense is a cross-linguistically rare and understudied phenomenon, with past vs. non-past being the minimal distinction. In some languages, past nominal tense implies the reading ‘deceased’, while in others, lifetime effects (i.e., implicatures about whether an individual is dead or alive) restrict its use with permanent properties (as with kinship terms). In our study, we investigate for the first time the online processing of lifetime effects in sentences with past nominal tense and kinship terms following contextual information about an individual’s lifetime status (dead or alive). An end-of-sentence acceptability judgment task completes the study. Evidence comes from 25 speakers of Pomak (Slavic, Greece) who use the realis past suffix to form, among others, definite articles, contrasting with a generic suffix for the future, habitual, and irrealis. In collaboration with a local Pomak research assistant, we prepared 80 experimental sentences with past nominal tense in four conditions, manipulating Lifetime Status (dead × alive) and Tense Concord between nominal and verbal tense/aspect (congruent × incongruent). Our results suggest that past nominal tense with kinship terms triggers a lifetime effect which is apparent during online processing. In the sentence final region, dead referents with future verbal tense are read faster, possibly due to the overtness and severity of the violation. Reading disruptions for dead referents while processing nominal tense are also discussed. In the acceptability task, participants rated sentences only based on the agreement of the lifetime status with verbal tense/aspect as the violation is overt and severe. The present study therefore offers support to previous reports of lifetime effects in other languages with nominal tense, highlighting another similarity between nominal and verbal tense.
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