近期活動

TIME, a crucial concept in human cognition, is differently encoded from one language to another. Yet, how time in language is processed in the brain remains unclear, as such an investigation was mainly conducted based on tense marking in Indo-European languages. The aim of this talk is to investigate how past TIME is expressed in Mandarin with the grammatical aspect markers LE and GUO, and the ‘you (to have) + VP’ construction in Taiwan Mandarin, as well as how the expression of past time with these markers is processed in the brain.

The first part of the talk is dedicated to the linguistic analyses of these markers. Morphosyntactic analyses are provided in order to distinguish between several instances of LE (le1, le2 and le3), GUO (guo1 and guo2) and ‘you + VP’. Then, semantic and morphosyntactic analyses are further proposed providing pieces of evidence against the tense analysis of LE, GUO and ‘you + VP’. These analyses support the claim that LE, GUO and ‘you + VP’ are used to express past time based on their respective semantic characteristics (aspectual for le1, guo1 and guo2, modal for ‘you + VP’). These semantic characteristics are linked with different grammatical processes: ‘temporal sequencing’ for le1, ‘temporal localization + temporal existence’ for guo1, ‘temporal localization’ for guo2, ‘temporal existence’ for ‘you + VP’.

In the second part of the talk, the linguistic analyses are tested with two sets of event-related potential (ERP) experiments. The processing of the temporal concord of le1, guo1, guo2 and ‘you + VP’ are investigated in the first set (three ERP experiments). The results indicate that different neuronal processes are at stake for each of the markers (early frontal negativity for le1, biphasic N400+P600 for guo1, P600 for guo2, N400 for ‘you + VP’). These ERP signatures map with the semantic and cognitive functions associated with these markers. In the second set of (two) ERP experiments, the temporal concord processing and aspectual concord processing of LE and GUO are teased apart, suggesting that the results obtained in the first set of experiments do not reflect general processing fashions (e.g., morphosyntactic or semantic repair) but processing mechanisms which are specific to the expression of past time with le1, guo1, guo2 and ‘you + VP’.

Taken together, the linguistic analyses of le1, guo1, guo2 and ‘you + VP’ as well as their neurocognitive processes form a general model of the expression of past time reference in Mandarin. This model sheds light on how time reference is computed in so-called ‘tenseless’ languages and opens numerous windows for further research in the typological and applied linguistic domains.