Language has the power to draw people's attention to a particular aspect of a situation or event. Alexander Becker spoke with Yiyun Liao about this. She is a psycholinguist and works as a PhD student at the Faculty of Psychology, Education and Child Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Contact:
Yiyun Liao
Email address: liao@essb.eur.nl
Telephone: +31684918680
LinkedIn: Yiyun Liao, PhD | LinkedIn
Alexander: Welcome, Yiyun! I heard that you are conducting PhD research on linguistics. Can you tell me more about your PhD topic?
Yiyun: Sure! My PhD project mainly focuses on the role of language in event conceptualization. One important part of this project is to look at how the wording of an event could influence how people comprehend this event. Language has the power to direct people’s attention to a certain aspect of an event. Grammatical aspect is one of such linguistic cues that can frame the same event differently. It is classified into imperfective aspect and perfective aspect. Imperfective aspect highlights the ongoing aspect of an event (e.g., she was cooking a meal), whereas perfective aspect emphasizes the resultant aspect of an event (e.g., she cooked a meal). Both of them can be used to describe past events. When hearing/reading an ongoing description of a past event, people would imagine the details of how an event was performed, including the involved agent, the performed action, the instrument used to perform the action, and the location of the event. In contrast, when hearing/reading a completed description of a past event, people would only pay attention to the result of the event and ignore the other details of the event.
Alexander: How could the insights of your PhD dissertation be used by companies?
Yiyun: Companies can apply these linguistic insights to various situations. For instance, when describing a car-testing experience to clients, you might want to use imperfective sentences, such as “Yesterday, we were driving the car to the seashore. It was running fast and smoothly”, rather than perfective sentences, such as “Yesterday, we drove the car to the seashore. It ran fast and smoothly”. The imperfective sentences allow the clients to experience an embodied driving experience in their brain. The clients would imagine that they were driving the car themselves. However, the perfective sentences do not have this function.
Another application is when writing about company events. To emphasize the vivid atmosphere of a company meeting, you might want to describe the meeting as ongoing, such as “During the meeting, employees were asking questions and proposing new ideas” rather than as completed, such as “During the meeting, employees asked questions and proposed new ideas”. The first description can trigger more vivid images in the readers’ mind, such as how people were asking questions at the meeting, their facial expressions, body postures, and the way they interacted with the meeting host, compared to the second description.
Alexander: Could this be checked by software such as Congree?
Yiyun: Yes, I think so. Congree can implement a rule that checks for, for example, the English imperfective aspect of [were asking], that is, [be + verb-ing], and the English perfective aspect of [asked], that is, [verb-ed]. You can replace the perfective descriptions with the imperfective descriptions using this rule. However, this rule should only be applied for certain purposes, that is, to provide the readers/hearers more engaged experiences of the described events.
tl;dr
Grammatical aspect is part of the grammar of a language. It can direct people’s attention to a certain aspect of an event. When an event is described as ongoing using imperfective aspect, the ongoing process and the action of this event is highlighted. When an event is described as completed using perfective aspect, only the result of the event is focused.
Alexander: Very interesting! You are looking for vacancies that are relevant to language and communication, right? How will you apply your PhD research in your future career?
Yiyun: While conducting my research, I deeply feel the power and importance of language use in human communication. What I have just mentioned is just the surface of an iceberg. Our life has never been this internationalized. Proper and accurate usage of a language is not just nice, it is the key to successful cooperation in any field. I also noticed that there is a big gap between linguistic research and business, which should not be the case. Therefore, I would like to apply what I have learned from my research into practice, for example, to improve business communication.
Summary
Grammatical aspect is part of the grammar of a language. It can direct people’s attention to a certain aspect of an event. When an event is described as ongoing using imperfective aspect, the ongoing process and the action of this event is highlighted. When an event is described as completed using perfective aspect, only the result of the event is focused.