Processing non-culminating accomplishments in European Portuguese

This paper investigates the processing and interpretation of non-culmination sentences and subjects' agentivity in European Portuguese. A five-point Likert scale is employed to test the native speaker's judgment regarding the acceptability of five types of non-culminating accomplishment se...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Authors: Zhang, Zichen, Gomes, Juliana Novo|||0000-0001-6834-1432, Leal, António|||0000-0002-6198-2496
Format: article
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repository:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:322180
Online Access:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/322180
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.572
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Non-culminating accomplishments
Aspect
Sentence processing
Self - paced reading
Likert - scale
Description
Summary:This paper investigates the processing and interpretation of non-culmination sentences and subjects' agentivity in European Portuguese. A five-point Likert scale is employed to test the native speaker's judgment regarding the acceptability of five types of non-culminating accomplishment sentences put forward in Guéron and Vogeleer (2021), providing evidence that speakers accept non-culminating accomplishments to a certain extent, albeit acceptance differs depending on the circumstance. Furthermore, while the subject's agentivity does have some bearing on the acceptability rating, it does not appear to be a requirement for non-culminating accomplishments in European Portuguese. A self-paced reading experiment also shows processing differences amongst five types of non-culminating accomplishments and that subject agentivity does not affect processing time.