PhD defence Y. (Yiyun ) Liao

Dissertation in short:

Events are commonly conveyed and understood through language. Language plays an important role in event studies. In this dissertation, I have focused on investigating the function of language in event conceptualization and event comprehension. Two specific linguistic cues play a central role in my dissertation, namely grammatical aspect and directional prepositions. Grammatical aspect is a morphosyntactic marker of the verb that specifies the temporal development of an event (e.g., progressive or completed). Directional prepositions are used to show some sort of movement (e.g., towards/to the village). The majority of the studies in the current dissertation is concentrating on examining how motion events (i.e., an agent moves in relation to a location/another object) are conceptualized and understood through language.

As I have just mentioned, grammatical aspect marks the temporal status of an event. Many language comprehension studies have experimentally tested the effect of grammatical aspect on the representations of an event during both sentence comprehension and discourse comprehension. Moreover, some studies have also examined the effect of grammatical aspect on social cognition, such as problem-solving and decision-making.