Abstract
The mechanisms underlying the processing of the temporal reference of a sentence are still unexplored. Most of the previous psycholinguistic studies used the temporal concord violation between deictic time adverbs and tense marking on the verb to investigate this issue. They found that processing past tense marking is more difficult than non-past tense, indicated by lower accuracy rates and/or longer reaction time. However, it is not clear whether this complexity is due to tense marking or the temporal reference it denotes. This paper examines this issue with a judgment acceptability experiment in Taiwan Mandarin, which is analyzed as a tenseless language. The two modal auxiliary verbs you and hui were placed after deictic past time adverbs (grammatical with you but not with hui) and deictic future time adverbs (grammatical with hui but not with you). The temporal concord violation of the auxiliary verb you led to higher acceptability rates but longer reaction time than hui, reflecting higher processing difficulties. This paper argues that these complexities are due to the existential-assertive meaning of you, which interplays with the meaning of the event described by the verb rendering the situation more or less likely to occur in the future. The computation of the temporal concord of hui, displaying a future sense meaning, is more straightforward and therefore easier to process. This suggests that the mechanisms responsible for temporal reference processing are of different nature depending on the semantics of the temporal marker in the sentence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data, Material and Code Availability
The experimental materials, anonymized dataset of the results and R script are available in the open repository at the following address: https://osf.io/rzgc2/.
Notes
The term ‘temporal concord’ is adopted in the present study instead of ‘tense agreement’ or ‘temporal agreement’ because the grammatical and ungrammatical temporal concord configurations in (1) and (2) can also be found in languages without overt tense marking, such as Mandarin Chinese (Collart & Chan, 2021). Therefore, this term allows us for direct comparisons with typologically-different languages regarding the grammatical expression of the temporal reference of a sentence.
We use the linguistic convention to indicate ungrammatical sentences with an asterisk. The following linguistic glosses are also used in the present study: cl – classifier, neg – negation, sfp – sentence-final particle.
The differences in the experimental designs of these studies mostly consist of which condition is taken as the baseline, i.e., whether the baseline condition has the same verb form (Collart & Zeitoun, 2023) or not (Faroqi-Shah & Dickey, 2009; Dragoy et al., 2012; Biondo et al., 2022). These are further discussed in the last section of the article.
The origin of the PADILIH comes from agrammatic aphasia patient studies pointing out that grammatical marking referring to past time reference was more impaired at the production and comprehension levels than non-past time reference (Bastiaanse et al., 2011), and therefore this hypothesis focuses on time reference expressed by grammatical markers (verbal morphemes, auxiliary verbs, etc.).
See Wu (2020:57–58) for arguments to keep the analysis of hui as prominently a modal rather than tense auxiliary verbs based on its behavior in subordinate clause and interaction with negation and aspect markers.
This implies that sentences involving a deictic past time adverb and hui could also be interpreted as ‘having the capacity of doing something in the past’, as in Zhangsan zuotian hui chang na-shou ge, jintian que bu hui le Zhangsan yesterday HUI sing this-cl song, today but neg HUI sfp ‘Zhangsan could/had the capacity to sing this song yesterday, but he cannot anymore today’. Such interpretations are more marked and require additional context. We go back to this point inthe Methodology section.
The experimental materials, anonymized dataset of the results and R script are available in the open repository at the following address: https://osf.io/rzgc2/.
The threshold of 1500 milliseconds was taken after the visual inspection of the mean reaction time by participant across the experimental conditions showing that there were clear outliers, whose mean reaction time was way below the one of other participants (around 3000 milliseconds).
We found individual differences concerning the ratings of the Future-You condition, as a subgroup of 27 participants had the tendency not to completely reject these sentences. However, this group did not differ from the majority in terms of age, gender, and proportion of speakers of Taiwanese Southern Min and/or English. We also conducted the statistical analyses on the majority group only, but the results were not different from the ones reported below. Since there are no warrant conclusions so far explaining such individual differences, we do not focus on this issue in the following sections.
This corresponded to eleven sentences in the Future-You condition only. These sentences are further discussed in the subsequent sections and listed in Appendix A.
One of the deviant sentences is not considered here because after further inspection, we realized that it was ambiguous between analyzing you as a lexical verb or an auxiliary verb.
References
Baggio, G. (2008). Processing temporal constraints: An ERP study. Language Learning, 58(s1), 35–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2008.00460.x.
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(3), 255–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001.
Bastiaanse, R. (2018). What language impairments can tell us about the organization of language in the brain. In B. Sharp, W. Lubaszewski, & F. Sedes (Eds.), Natural language processing and cognitive science – Proceedings 2018 (pp. 9–18). Jagiellonian Library.
Bastiaanse, R., Bamyaci, E., Hsu, C. J., Lee, J., Yarbay Duman, T., & Thompson, C. K. (2011). Time reference in agrammatic aphasia: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 24(6), 652–673. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2011.07.001.
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting Linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.
Bhat, D. N. S. (1999). The prominence of tense, aspect and mood. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.49.
Biondo, N. (2017). The syntactic side of time: Processing adverb-verb temporal agreement. University of Trento Dissertation. http://eprints-phd.biblio.unitn.it/1929/.
Biondo, N., Bergamini, E., & Vespignani, F. (2021). The processing of temporal concord in sentences: An ERP investigation into the role of verb-adverb distance. In T. Vicenç (Ed.), Syntax Processing (pp. 1–47). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Biondo, N., Soilemezidi, M., & Mancini, S. (2022). Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery: An eye-tracking investigation of the processing of past and future time reference during sentence reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 48(7), 1001–1018. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001053.
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I., & Schlesewsky, M. (2016). The argument dependency model. In H., Gregory, & S. L., Small (Eds.), Neurobiology of language (pp. 357–369). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-407794-2.00030-4.
Bos, L. S., Dragoy, O., Stowe, L. A., & Bastiaanse, R. (2013). Time reference teased apart from tense: Thinking beyond the present. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 26(2), 283–297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2012.10.001.
Bott, O. (2010). Chapter 7. The processing of temporality in the brain. In The Processing of Events (pp. 193–234). John Benjamins Publishing Co. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.162.
Brehm, L., & Alday, P. M. (2022). Contrast coding choices in a decade of mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 125., Article 104334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2022.104334.
Chen, X., & Saillard, C. (2011). Prospective and posterior aspect in Mandarin Chinese: On the aspectual value of modals yao and hui [Paper presentation]. 7th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL-7), Ca’Foscari University, Venice, Italy.
Collart, A. (2018). When time is a fact: A semantic and time-relational analysis of ‘You + VP’ in Taiwan Mandarin [Paper presentation]. 19th Chinese lexical semantics workshop (CLSW-19). National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi.
Collart, A., & Chan, S. (2021). Processing past time reference in a tenseless language: An ERP study on the Mandarin aspectual morphemes -Le and -guo. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 59., Article 100998. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2021.100998.
Collart, A., & Su, H. K. (2022). Expressing the existence of an event with ‘you (to have) + VP’ in Taiwan Mandarin: A corpus-based investigation. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, 48(2), 249–284. https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.21046.col.
Collart, A., & Zeitoun, E. (2023). Past and future time reference processing teased apart in Paiwan, an endangered formosan language. Language and Cognition, FirstView, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2023.49.
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge University Press.
Comrie, B. (1985). Tense. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139165815.
Copley, B. (2008). The plan’s the thing: Deconstructing futurate meanings. Linguistic Inquiry, 39(2), 261–274. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2008.39.2.261.
Dragoy, O., Stowe, L. A., Bos, L. S., & Bastiaanse, R. (2012). From time to time: Processing time reference violations in Dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(1), 307–325. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2011.09.001.
Drummond, A. (2013). Ibex Farm. Access: https://farm.pcibex.net/.
Faroqi-Shah, Y., & Dickey, M. W. (2009). On-line processing of tense and temporality in agrammatic aphasia. Brain and Language, 108(2), 97–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2008.10.003.
Fonteneau, E., Frauenfelder, U. H., & Rizzi, L. (1998). On the contribution of ERPs to the study of language comprehension. Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée, 68, 111–124.
Friederici, A. D. (2011). The brain basis of language processing: From structure to function. Physiological Reviews, 91(4), 1357–1392. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00006.2011.
Hagoort, P. (2003). How the brain solves the binding problem for language: A neurocomputational model of syntactic processing. Neuroimage, 20(s1), 18–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.09.013.
He, Y. (2020). Time in Mandarin: The fingerprints of tense and finiteness Harvard University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/time-mandarin-fingerprints-tense-finiteness/docview/2467856383/se-2.
Hsieh, C. L. (2001). On the emphatic shi and predictive-assertive Hui in Mandarin. Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, 31(3), 249–300.
Khoo, Y. K., & Lin, J. (2020). A corpus-based investigation of yŏu in Singapore Mandarin: The case for an existential perfect marker. In Q. Su,Z., Weidong (Ed.), From minimal contrast to meaning construct (pp. 101–118). Peking University. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9240-6_8.
Klein, W. (1994). Time in Language. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315003801.
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. B. (2017). lmerTest Package: Tests in Linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical Software, 82(13), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v082.i13.
Lenth, R. V. (2020). emmeans: Estimated Marginal Means, aka Least-Squares Means (version 1.4.6). R Project. https://cran.r-project.org/packages/emmeans/index.html.
Li, C. N., & Thompson, S. A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. University of California Press.
Lin, J. W. (2003). Temporal reference in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 12, 259–311. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023665301095.
Lin, J. W. (2006). Time in a language without tense: The case of Chinese. Journal of Semantics, 23(1), 1–53. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffh033.
Liu, C. T. J. (2011). Motivations for grammaticalization: A case study of the realis marker you in Taiwan Mandarin. [Paper presentation]. 12th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW-11). National Taiwan University.
Lyons, J. (1977). Modality. Semantics (pp. 787–849). Cambridge University Press.
Mao, T., Biondo, N., & Zheng, Z. (2022). Adult Chinese Spanish L2ers’ acquisition of phi-agreement and temporal concord: The role of morphosyntactic features and adverb/subject-verb distance. Frontiers in Psychology, 13., Article 1007828. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1007828.
Moeschler, J. (2020). Temporal reference and temporal order. In Non-Lexical Pragmatics (pp. 79–110). Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218497-004.
Mucha, A. (2015). Temporal interpretation and cross-linguistic variation. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Potsdam]. URN:NBN Resolver for Germany and Switzerland. https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/8593.
Palmer, F. R. (2001). Mood and modality. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139167178.
R Core Team. (2018). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Reichenbach, H. (2005). The tenses of verbs. In I. Mani, J. Pustejovsky & R. Gaizauskas (Eds.), The language of time: A reader (pp. 71–78). Oxford University Press. (Original work: Reichenbach, H. (1947). Elements of symbolic logic. London: Dover Publications.)
Sanders, R. M. (1992). The expression of modality in Peking and Taipei Mandarin. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 20(2), 289–314.
Smith, C. S. (1997). The parameter of aspect. Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5606-6.
Smith, C. S., & Erbaugh, M. S. (2005). Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics, 43(4), 713–756. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2005.43.4.713.
Suddendorf, T., Addis, D. R., & Corballis, M. C. (2009). Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 1317–1324.
Tang, T. C., Chang, S. M., & Liao, Y. P. (2010). A study of the research history for the grammar of Taiwanese languages: Southern-Min dialects. Journal of Taiwanese Languages and Literature, 5, 81–102.
Tsai, W. T. D. (2002). You ‘have’ in Taiwan Mandarin and dialects – on the social and historical aspects of grammatical theories. Tsinghua Journal of Chinese Studies, 32(2), 495–528.
Tsiwah, F., Bastiaanse, R., van Rij, J., & Popov, S. (2021). Online processing of temporal agreement in a grammatical tone language: An ERP study. Frontiers in Psychology, 12., Article 638716. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638716.
Wen, H. (2002). You ‘(y) avoir’ grammatical dans Le mandarin de Taïwan [Grammatical you ‘to have’ in Taiwan Mandarin]. Cahiers De Linguistique Asie Orientale, 31(2), 279–292.
Wu, J. S. (2020). Ambiguity of epistemic Hui in Mandarin Chinese revisited: Towards a unified semantics. In Q. Su,Z., Weidong (Ed.), From minimal contrast to meaning construct (pp. 51–62). Peking University. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9240-6_4.
Wu, J. S., & Zheng, Z. R. (2018). Towards a unified semantics for ū in ū + situation in Taiwan Southern Min: A modal-aspectual account. In J.-F., Hong, S., Su, & J.-S., Wu (Eds.), Chinese Lexical Semantics, 19th Workshop, CLSW 2018, LNAI (pp. 408–422). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_34.
Zagona, K. (2003). Tense and anaphora: Is there a tense-specific theory of coference? In A., Barss (Ed.), Anaphora: A reference guide (pp. 140–171). Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470755594.ch6.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. I would like to thank the audience of the 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing as well as Dr. Shiaohui Chan and Dr. Elizabeth Zeitoun for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Funding
This work was not supported by any grant or funds.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethics Approval
This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board on Biomedical Science Research of Academia Sinica (application number: AS-IRB01-22042).
Conflict of interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendix A
Appendix A
The list of the eleven ‘deviant’ sentence are given below in (13a–k) along with their mean ratings and standard deviation.
(13) | a. | Xiaozhang | mingtian | you | guihua | dianli. |
headmaster | tomorrow | YOU | plan | ceremony | ||
‘The headmaster has planned a ceremony for tomorrow.’ (M = 5.43, SD = 2.15) | ||||||
b. | Dianzhang | mingtian | you | cuxiao | xin shangpin. | |
store.manager | tomorrow | YOU | promote | new.product | ||
‘The store manager will promote the sales of the new product tomorrow.’ (M = 4.92, SD = 2.49) | ||||||
c. | Guozhongsheng | mingtian | you | kao | shuxue. | |
junior.high. school.student | tomorrow | YOU | take.a.test | math | ||
‘The junior high school student will have a math test tomorrow.’ (M = 4.67, SD = 2.62) | ||||||
d. | Daoyan | mingtian | you | xuanchuan | jilupian. | |
movie.director | tomorrow | YOU | publicize | documentary.film | ||
‘The movie director will publicize the documentary film tomorrow.’ (M = 4.63, SD = 2.60) | ||||||
e. | Zhuren | mingtian | you | shenqing | jihua. | |
department. director | tomorrow | YOU | apply | project | ||
‘The director of the department will apply for a project tomorrow.’ (M = 4.56, SD = 2.27) | ||||||
f. | Jitashou | mingtian | you | shang | jiemu. | |
guitarist | tomorrow | YOU | attend | TV.show | ||
‘The will be in the TV show tomorrow.’ (M = 4.49, SD = 2.36) | ||||||
g. | Shouyinyuan | mingtian | you | fa | youhuijuan. | |
cashier | tomorrow | YOU | distribute | coupons | ||
‘The cashier will distribute coupons tomorrow.’ (M = 4.37, SD = 2.56) | ||||||
h. | Liwei | mingtian | you | taolun | faan. | |
deputy | tomorrow | YOU | discuss | bill | ||
‘The deputy will discuss the bill tomorrow.’ (M = 4.22, SD = 2.42) | ||||||
i. | Lizhang | mingtian | you | jie | chezi. | |
neighborhood. warden | tomorrow | YOU | rent | car | ||
‘The neighborhood warden will rent a car tomorrow.’ (M = 4.15, SD = 2.47) | ||||||
j. | Shangren | mingtian | you | deng | guangao. | |
businessman | tomorrow | YOU | advertise | advertisement | ||
‘The businessman will publish an advertisement tomorrow.’ (M = 4.11, SD = 2.41) | ||||||
k. | Laoshi | mingtian | you | jiao | Yingguo lishi. | |
teacher | tomorrow | YOU | teach | UK.history | ||
‘The teacher will teach UK history tomorrow.’ (M = 4.05, SD = 2.46) | ||||||
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Collart, A. It Costs To Exist: Acceptability Judgments of the Temporal Concord of the Auxiliary Verbs You and Hui in Taiwan Mandarin. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 44 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10086-5
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10086-5