Pragmatic accommodation in judging event culmination

Abstract

This study investigates Mandarin speakers’ acceptability of telic descriptions for incomplete situations, focusing on the role of pragmatic accommodation. Previ- ous research (Xu & Schmitt to appear a, to appear b) has shown that in judging event culmination, when two out three objects were fully consumed or created and the third object was partially affected (e.g., a girl eating two cookies and taking a bite from the third one), participants were able to restrict the domain of the definite/demonstrative DP (but not the noun phrases with the numeral three) to refer only to the fully consumed or created objects and, we argued, because of that, tended to accept the description as matching the event. In the present study, we examined a different type of (non)-culmination in which all objects were partially consumed or created (e.g., a girl taking a bite from each of three cookies/partially building three houses), a context where domain restriction of this type is not possible. Sur- prisingly, participants accepted sentences with both demonstrative and numeral direct objects as “good enough” descriptions of the event. These findings further challenge the idea of a general mechanism for the acceptance of telic descriptions in (non)-culminating situations, and instead support specific effects depending on how different ingredients of aspectual composition and visual context interact.