If you want a quick kiss, make it count: How choice of syntactic construction affects event construal

- Syntactic alternations often correlate with subtle meaning differences.
- Six studies investigate temporal estimates for events, number of imagined events, and event similarity.
- Temporal estimates, numerosity and event similarity people give for events are influenced by syntactic construction.
- The factors interacting are mass vs. count syntax and verbal aspect.

When we hear an event description, our mental construal is not only based on lexical items, but also on the message's syntactic structure. This has been well-studied in the domains of causation, event participants, and object conceptualization. Less studied are the construals of temporality and numerosity as a function of syntax. We present a theory of how syntax affects the construal of event similarity and duration in a way that is systematically predictable from the interaction of mass/count syntax and verb semantics, and test these predictions in six studies. Punctive events in count syntax (give a kiss) and durative events in mass syntax (give advice) are construed as taking less time than in transitive frame (kiss and advise). Durative verbs in count syntax (give a talk), however, result in a semantic shift, orthogonal to duration estimates. These results demonstrate how syntactic and semantic structure together systematically affect event construal.