If You Want A Quick Kiss, Make It Count: How Choice Of Syntactic Construction Affects Event Construal

When we hear an event description, our construal of the event is not only based on the lexical items in the message, but also on the message’s syntactic structure. This has been well-studied in the domains of how listeners conceptualize causation, roles of event participants, or object properties, depending on syntactic choices. Less studied are subtle aspects of the construal of temporality and numerosity of events as a function of syntax. This paper presents a theory of how the syntax of a event description affects the construal of event similarity and duration in a way that is systematically predictable from the interaction of mass versus count syntax and verb semantics, and tests these predictions in six studies. We found that punctive events in count syntax (give a hug) and durative events in mass syntax (give advice) are construed as taking less time than in transitive verb frame (hug and advise). Durative verbs in count syntax, on the other hand, yield a different pattern: Count syntax (give a talk), compared to simple transitive constructions (talk), leads to a semantic shift in event structure and does not systematically affect duration estimates. These results support our theory of how syntactic and semantic structure together affect event construal.