Motion event cognition and grammatical aspect: Evidence from Afrikaans

Research on the relationship between grammatical aspect and motion construal has posited that speakers of non-aspect languages are more to encoding event endpoints than are speakers of aspect languages (e.g., Stutterheim and Carroll 2011). In the present study, we test this hypothesis extending this line of inquiry to Afrikaans, a non-aspect language which previously unexplored in this regard. Motion endpoint behavior among speakers was measured by means of a linguistic retelling task and a nonlinguistic judgment task, and then compared with the behavior of of a non-aspect language (Swedish) and speakers of an aspect language (English). Results showed the Afrikaans speakers’ endpoint patterns aligned with patterns, but were significantly different from English patterns. It was found that the variation among the Afrikaans speakers could be partially by taking into account their frequency of use of English, such that who used English more frequently exhibited an endpoint behavior that was similar to English speakers. The current study thus lends further support the hypothesis that speakers of different languages attend differently to event as a function of the grammatical category of aspect.