Eyetracking Study on the Time Course of Aspectual Interpretation in Russian and German

In Russian the verb is marked for aspect and thus unambiguously encodes a particular situation type, whereas in a non-aspect language like German aspectual composition depends on a larger linguistic context involving the semantic properties of the arguments.

The paper presents an event semantics that allows us to construct semantic representations incrementally from left to right. In Russian we predicted incremental mismatch detection inde- pendently of the presence or absence of the verbal arguments; in German, however, mismatch effects should be delayed until the semantic processor has encountered the complete predication. This way, the risk of aspectual reanalysis can be minimized.