Is Basque Perfective Past a True Perfective? Evidence from a Visual World Paradigm Experiment

Abstract

Aspect, which refers to the unfolding of events in time, can be found lexically and grammatically encoded in several languages. This study focuses on grammatical perfectivity, which is traditionally described with the main conditions of culmination and totality. The purpose of this study is to investigate how Basque speakers process grammatical aspect, by contrasting perfective and imperfective constructions in the past tense. Specifically, it aims to examine to what extent Past Perfective tense triggers representations of result state saliency of accomplishments in speakers’ minds. For that purpose, a Visual World Paradigm (VWP) experiment with eye-tracking was conducted. Participants were presented with pairs of images depicting events in their ongoing and completed stages while hearing sentences in perfective and imperfective tenses. Participants’ eye-movements were tracked in order to detect the image that best matched the mental representation triggered by the sentences. Past Perfective tense was expected to attract more looks at the completed event, while Progressive Past was expected to draw more looks at the ongoing image. The offline and online results confirmed that hypothesis: participants were significantly more likely to prefer the picture that matched the grammatical aspect. Still, the target preference was slightly less pronounced in the perfective condition. The results suggest that Basque Perfective Past and Past Progressive are effective at generating representations of completion and ongoingness, respectively. Furthermore, we conclude that Basque Perfective Past can be compared to Spanish Pretérito Indefinido when it comes to expressing completion of events.