Data: dijous 26 de novembre del 2020

Hora: 12.00 h

Accés:  En línia, amb Collaborate (Enllaç: eu.bbcollab.com/guest/cbd918ec0de7403f94ba44b0a67b7a2d)

Resum:

Events are effortlessly segmented out of the on stream reality and referred to via language by means of verbs, as well as aspectual morphemes and adverbs which allow to focus on specific parts. This evidence suggests that there are primitives facilitating event individuation and segmentation beyond the commonly acknowledged ability to detect discontinuations in the ongoing activity thanks to visual clues or statistical structures. Following the literature in linguistics and philosophy on events, here we concentrate on telicity, i.e., the existence of an inherent bound determining the endpoint of an event, by presenting participants with videos showing actions consisting of an activity and a result component, whose combination results in possible or impossible events depending on the compatibility of the component parts. Overwhelmingly, the participants in our study considered both possible and impossible events coherent regardless of the inconsistencies between the action performed and the result state affecting the object, provided that they were able to attribute a goal to the actor, which we assume arises to meet a principle of efficiency. This finding suggests that teleological information comes first in the process of event individuation overriding aspectual information, i.e. telicity, which nonetheless was still present in participants’ descriptions of the events observed.