What happens in words: Towards a model of incremental event representation

The central aim of formal semantics is to model how the meanings of sentences are built
from the meanings of words, but without concern for the linear order that words appear in
during actual speech or writing. Conversely, psycholinguistic research concerns itself with
exactly this question - namely, how cognitive processes incrementally (word-by-word) build
meaning. Given the differences in the methods and goals of these two sub-disciplines,
psycholinguistic research has often underutilised the insights from semantic models,
particularly with respect to the events described by the words and sentences we use.
The way comprehenders construct events when they hear or read a sentence is quite
complex, and involves several decisions about who is involved in the event, where the event
takes place, the number of events, and how those events relate to one another. Consider a
sentence like (1).
1) Esther gleefully bought Neil Gaiman's new book with her credit card earlier this month,
and Khadija did too - but Jamie sure didn't.
Are there two purchasing events and two books described here, such that Esther and Khadija
separately bought a copy of the new book? Are there two purchasing events and a single
book, such that Esther bought the book and Khadija bought that very same book at a later
time, perhaps even from Esther? Is the most natural, default interpretation one of a single
purchasing event where they bought a single copy of the book together? Whose credit card
did Khadija use on each occasion, her own or Esther's? And what of Jamie? Is Jamie's nonpurchasing
represented as an event in the same way in the minds of comprehenders, or do
negated verbs result in different kinds of mental representation?
The way we are able to make sense of the worlds we create with language appears to be
especially tied up with how we construct a mental abstraction of the situation described by a
text or utterance from the potential underlying events of that sentence or wider discourse.
Events themselves have influenced research into topics in semantics as diverse as tense and
aspect (how time is encoded in language), adverbial modification (how the syntactic position
of words like 'quickly' subtly affects the meaning of a sentence), and argument realisation
(how the interpretive properties and meaning of verbs influence the syntactic contexts they
appear in) - see Bohnemeyer et al. (2007); Lascarides and Asher (1993); Pianesi and Varzi
(2000); Rappaport Hovav (2008); Smith (2006); Tenny (2000). Much less has been written
about the psychology of these events.
While Bott and Sternefeld (2017) showed how insights about events in formal semantics
could, in theory, be applied to incremental interpretations, comparatively little work has
been conducted on how comprehenders conceptualise and process event information word
by word, in real-time. The goal of the proposed project is, therefore, to conduct three distinct
but interrelated experiments on the real-time processing of understudied event phenomena,
utilising EEG, eye-tracking, and reaction time tasks, respectively. Taking advantage of my
background in both formal semantics and cognitive processing, and drawing upon the
supervision of researchers with experience in both areas, the present study will bring
together insights from these often disparate approaches in an interdisciplinary effort to
explore and explain the mechanisms underlying comprehenders' conceptualisations of
events as speech and writing unfolds.
The value of this project is twofold. First, by developing a robust account of how events are incrementally represented in the mind, the groundwork will be laid for future research into a fundamental aspect of language. Second, perceptual psychology has observed that people
parse continuous streams of visual activity into meaningful event-like chunks, an automatic cognitive process which scaffolds future memory and learning (Zacks and Swallow, 2007).