Event numeration in situation model construction: two e or not to e

Comprehenders routinely construct abstracted representations of the situations described by language, integrate these representations with existing knowledge, and store these in memory for later access. How negation and distributivity interact with the underlying events of verbal predicates that aggregate into these message-level representations (known as situation models) is not well understood. Addressing this question is the principal focus of this thesis. Across three related studies, I examine (i) the effect of verbal negation on access to conceptual information inside a negated event via a probe word task, including whether negation of elided and explicit clauses influences access to representations differently; (ii) the effect of ambiguously distributive constructions on event representations via a self-paced reading task, measuring responses to critical words consistent or inconsistent with collective and distributive readings, including whether manipulations of the timespan in which the event occurs affects these representations; and (iii) via two EEG experiments that measure prediction error and reanalysis effects, the role of negation and distributivity on a well-attested event processing phenomenon, wherein comprehenders possess a priori assumptions that events will be ordered singularly and contiguously. This thesis demonstrates that verbal negation suppresses event representations from forming part of the developing mental model and violates comprehenders’ expectations of event contiguity, with the effect being different in explicit clauses and elided ones. Ambiguously distributive and overtly distributive constructions lead comprehenders to reanalysing their expectations of singular-event contiguity, while both collective and distributive representations remain accessible following ambiguous texts; a preference for distributive readings is observed where the timespan in which the event can occur is extended. Taken together, these results have consequences for our theories of language comprehension: comprehenders monitor and mentally represent the number of events within their linguistic input, such that how events are enumerated influences the construction of a comprehender's message-level situation model.