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ORIGINAL PAPER
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity:An Experimental Study Using Inter-AnnotatorAgreement Rates and Corpus-Based Data
Cristina Grisot1,2
Received: 11 November 2016 / Accepted: 19 June 2017 / Published online: 27 June 2017
The notion of subjectivity is highly used in the literature to account for various
linguistic phenomena, among which the pragmatic uses of verbal tenses and
pragmatic interpretations of the perfective and imperfective grammatical aspect are
of interest in this paper. Subjectivity has been defined as the type of construal
relation built in the discourse (in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar 1996, 2006), the
expression of the self in literary criticism (e.g. Banfield 1982/1995), the expression
of the speaker’s or a third party’s perspective in linguistic and pragmatic studies
(e.g. Traugott 1989, 1995, 1999), and the speaker’s evidence for her claims in
computational linguistics (e.g. Wiebe 1994) and psycholinguistics (e.g. Sanders
et al. 1992, 1993; Sanders 2005). Despite this heterogeneity, scholars agree that
subjectivity in language refers to the speaker’s involvement in the description of
situations (also called empathy by Kuno and Kaburaki 1975; Kuno 2004). In this
study, I investigate experimentally and from a cross-linguistic perspective two types
of linguistic cues of subjectivity, which are verbal tenses and grammatical aspect.
The research is carried out in naturally occurring data coming from parallel corpora.
Using offline experiments with linguistic judgement task, I have tested whether
subjectivity is identifiable with a reliable agreement rate by native speakers.
This paper is structured as follows.1 Section “Different approaches to subjectivity”
critically discusses the various approaches to the issue and points out the necessity to
have a definition of subjectivity that allows empirical testing. This definition and its
operationalization are presented in “A working definition of subjectivity in this
study” section. Section “Experimental work” is dedicated to the experimental work
carried out. The results of the experiments and the integration of these results into a
pragmatic model of verbal tenses are given in “Subjectivity: a pragmatic feature”
section. Section “Conclusion” concludes this paper and offers a series of possible
developments of the present research in future work. Additionally, the Appendix
contains the English version of the annotation guidelines used in the experiments.
Defining Subjectivity
Different Approaches to Subjectivity
The notion of subjectivity has been conceived of in different ways in the literature.
The array of definitions of subjectivity goes from a subjective vs. an objectiveconstrual relation in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991, 2006;
Trnavac 2006), to subjectivity as a cognitive principle in T. Sanders’ cognitive
approach to connectives and discourse relations (Sanders et al. 1992, 1993; Pit
1 The author is grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and to the editor for their very useful and
relevant comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. They have helped me to make this
paper more precise. “I would like to thank Jacques Moeschler and Gaetanelle Gilquin for their valuable
comments and suggestions for this research, which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
The financing was obtained for the VTS project (Verbal tenses and subjectivity: an empirical cognitiveapproach”, application no. 100015_170008/1)
28 C. Grisot
123
2003; Sanders et al. 2012; Stukker and Sanders 2012), to the expression of anexperiencing vs. narrating self in literary criticism in general (Genette 1972;
Fleischman 1990), linked to a certain discourse type, such as the Free Indirect
2016; Eckardt 2014), or linked to types of modes of discourse, such as narrative,
description, report, information and argument (Smith 2003). A series of studies
adopting a linguistic or a pragmatic perspective define subjectivity as the expressionof the speaker’s or of a third party’s perspective (Benveniste 1966; Lyons
2013). Finally, subjectivity defined as the speaker’s evidence for her claims was
identified as an important factor for discourse processing both for machines (Wiebe
1994, Wiebe et al. 1999; Chen 2008) and for humans (Sanders 2005; Canestrelli
et al. 2013; Zufferey and Gygax 2016).
Benveniste (1966/1971) and Lyons (1982) pointed out that languages provide the
speaker with the linguistic means to express her attitudes and beliefs. For them,
subjectivity is expressed at the level of pronominal and temporal deixis. Benveniste
predicted that verbal tenses are used according to the type of enunciation and
personal pronouns: the simple past, the imperfect and the pluperfect with the 3rd
personal pronoun are used in the historical enunciation (i.e., past time events),
whereas the present, the past compound and the future are excluded. As for
discursive enunciation, all verbal tenses may be used with the exception of the
simple past. Later on, adopting a pragmatic approach, Moeschler (2014) showed
with the help of the historical present that Benveniste’s view of subjectivity and its
link to verbal tenses and personal pronouns is problematic. He suggested that
subjectivity is a pragmatic component of language, and that verbal tenses have
subjective and non-subjective usages.
Banfield (1982) was the first to reject Benveniste’s proposal. She showed that
subjectivity can be identified for other verbal tenses (such as the imperfect) and other
pronouns (such as the third person pronoun), specifically in their usage in the FID
(containing represented speech and thought). Banfield based her distinction between
objective and subjective sentences on discourse structure (reported speech that sharesfeatures with both direct and indirect speech). Subjective sentences integrate the
consciousness of an experiencing character (using Banfield’s terminology) within the
description of a series of situations, thus expressing an individual’s evaluations,
emotions, judgments, uncertainties, beliefs and attitudes. Subjective sentences may
express an individual’s thought or perception called represented thought or
represented perception, and an individual’s private state (seeing, wanting, feeling).For Banfield, the difference between French sentences in (1) containing a passe
simple (simple past) and in (2) containing an imparfait (imperfect) (both sentences
are translations into French of the same English sentence containing a simple past)
lies in the absence or presence, respectively, of a “self at a moment corresponding to
an act of consciousness” (Banfield 1982, 158; also Fleischman 1990, 1995). The
utterance in (1) objectively describes the seeing of the moon by a narrating-self,while the utterance in (2) implies that the event of the seeing of the moon is
experienced at a moment by an experiencing-self. In other words, the passe simple
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 29
123
conveys the objective narration of the seeing of the moon event and the imparfait
conveys the subjective experiencing interpretation.
(1) Elle vit la lune.
‘She saw the moon.’
(2) Elle voyait la lune (maintenant)
‘She saw the moon (was seeing the moon now).’
Hence, the passe simple is non-experiential and entirely detached from the speaker
(Fleischman 1990, 31). Consequently, all other tense-aspect categories used in
narratives involve an experiencing-self at some degree of detachment depending on
each verbal tense. However, the deterministic relation passe simple—non-subjective
and imparfait—subjective was contested by several scholars adopting a pragmatic
approach, such as Sthioul (1998, 2000), Tahara (2000), Saussure (2003, 2013).
Sthioul (2000) Moeschler et al. (1998) argued that the French passe simple points to
the moment when an individual becomes aware of the situation under description as
in (3) and (4). The reader understands by inference that the situation described
existed before the moment of awareness. These examples show the subjective usage
of the passe simple.
(3) Paul sortit. Dehors, il fit bigrement froid.
‘Paul went out. Outside, it was fantastically cold.’
(4) La route sortit de la foret. (Vailland, 325,000 francs)‘The road left the forest.’
Other scholars (Reboul 1992; Vuillaume 1990; Tahara 2000) extended subjec-
tivity to include the second person pronoun and argued that subjectivity can occur in
narratives that are not FID, such as in (5). In the following fragment, the italicized
verbs are in the preterit form (the passe simple) and they express the advancement
of time seen from Emma’s point of view (she was terrified and exhausted).
(5) – Monsieur vous attend, madame, la soupe est servie. Et il fallut descendre! Ilfallut se mettre a table! Elle essaya de manger. Les morceaux l’etouffaient.
(Flaubert, Madame Bovary)‘– Sir (Charles) is waiting for you, madam; the soup is served. And she had to
go downstairs! She had to sit to the table! She tried to eat. The bites of food
suffocated her.’
Moreover, Traugott’s work on subjectivity (1989, 1995, 1999) pointed to two
central ideas defended in the linguistic and pragmatic approaches: (i) subjectivity
arises when the speaker’s psychological or emotional perspective is incorporated
into the description of a situation, and (ii) subjectivity is a context-dependent
feature. For Traugott and Dasher (2002, 98), ‘most frequently, an expression is
neither subjective nor objective in itself; rather the whole utterance and its context
determine de degree of subjectivity’.
30 C. Grisot
123
Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (1991, 2006) adopts a conceptual semantics
based on human experience and on our capacity to construct and to mentally
represent situations differently at various occasions. Hence, linguistic meaning
embodies a particular way of constructing a situation. For Langacker, a speaker
establishes a construal relationship with two elements: the conceptualizer—who is
part of the ground, including the speech participants and the speech act—and the
object of conceptualization. Usually, the viewpoint of the conceptualizer is reflected
in the linguistic expression. This can be done implicitly, as in the case of verbal
tenses, which indirectly indicate the temporal relationship between the ground and
the event, or explicitly as in (6), where the conceptualizer is ‘onstage’ and his
relation with the object of conceptualization is explicit. In this case the construal is
objective. The construal is subjective when the presence of the conceptualizer and
his viewpoint are expressed implicitly, as in (7) (Langacker 2002, 19). However, for
authors adopting the linguistic and pragmatic approach, these two examples are both
objective.
(6) Mulroney was sitting across the table from me.(7) Mulroney was sitting across the table.
For Langacker, deixis implying reference to the ground is a crucial element for
determining subjectivity. Nevertheless, in this framework, first person reference is
used in objective construals, whereas it is a central component for the expression of
subjectivity in linguistic and pragmatic approaches (Narrog 2012).
In a theory of cognitive discourse representation, Sanders et al. (1992, 1993) treat
subjectivity as a fundamental cognitive and discursive principle, which accounts not
only for use of causal relations and their linguistic properties, but also for the
cognitive complexity of discourse connections in language acquisition and
discourse processing. Subjectivity is understood as the degree to which the
conceptualizer—the person responsible for the causal relation, who may be the
speaker or an agent—is present in the utterance (Spooren et al. 2010). Pit (2007)
suggested that the crucial element determining whether a causal relation is
subjective or not, is its locus of effect, which is the participant or entity around
whom/which causality is centred. If the locus of effect coincides with the speaker or
the author, the causal relation is subjective. Pit (2003) found that the Dutch
objective connective omdat ‘because’ occurs more frequently with objective
pluperfect or simple past verbal tenses, whereas the subjective want ‘for’ (causal)was more often combined with the subjective simple present and the future. Sanders
and Redeker (1996) found that sequences of sentences in the simple past imply an
objective, distanced view of the narrator, whereas the simple present tense is more
lively and expressive, ‘as if the narrator or character gives an eyewitness report’
(Sanders 2005, 108).
Since Comrie’s seminal work on aspect, the imperfective aspect has been
associated with subjective interpretations, while perfective aspect has been
connected with objective interpretations (Comrie 1976; Caenepeel 1989). The
imperfective aspect takes an “internal perspective”, focusing on a sub-interval of an
ongoing event. This is interpreted as pointing to the speaker’s experiencing mind.
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 31
123
The perfective aspect, on the other hand, presents the situation from an external
perspective by offering an understanding of the situation as a whole (Comrie 1976).
The main assumption is that the relation between grammatical aspect and modality
involves subjectivity: the imperfective aspect expresses perspectivized and subjec-
tive information in narratives, where it can represent speech and thoughts of an
individual other than the speaker (Caenepeel 1989; Fleischmann 1995; Smith 1997;
Boogaart 1999, 2007; Trnavac 2006). Trnavac (2006) investigates this hypothesized
correlation in a corpus-based study on Russian, Serbian, Dutch and German. Using
Langacker’s notion of subjectivity, she found that modal interpretations may be
expressed through both imperfective and perfective aspects in tensed and in aspect-
prominent languages. However, subjective modal meanings most often correlate
with the imperfective aspect.
This literature review shows two main problems regarding the notion of
subjectivity. The first one is that subjectivity was studied from a theoretical point of
view, with the exception of Trnavac’s (2006) corpus-based investigation. In her
study, subjective and non-subjective usages of grammatical aspect are identified by
the author herself by three tests in order to estimate degrees of subjectivity. This is
problematic because naıve speakers might not have the same interpretations of the
corpus data. The second one is the fact that the notion of subjectivity is understood
and used differently from one study to another. Particularly, this can be seen when
comparing linguistic, pragmatic and Sanders’ cognitive standpoints to Langacker’s,
in which the concepts of subjectivity, perspective and viewpoint result in different
evaluations of utterances (as shown in examples (6) and (7)). For this reason, in this
research, I will not further consider Langacker’s approach to subjectivity. Despite
this variety of assessments of subjectivity, a common idea which seems to emerge is
that it refers to the speaker’s involvement. Linguistic and pragmatic approaches
pointed to a series of linguistic expressions which may be more or less correlated
with subjective and non-subjective interpretations. Hence, in this study, I will
pursue this path and will experimentally test in a systematic manner the predictions
made by scholars for French and English verbal tenses and for grammatical aspect.
AWorking Definition of Subjectivity in This Study
As we have seen, both grammatical and lexical forms may give rise to subjective
interpretations. Specifically, three main areas of linguistic sources of subjectivity
were identified. The first is deixis and its linguistic expression, which mainly
includes reference to the here and now in language. The second is modality andevidentiality, in which subjectivity is a characteristic of mental-state predicates,
modal verbs, and connectives that express the speaker’s degree of commitment
towards what is said (cf. Sanders and colleagues’ analysis of causal connectives in
Dutch). The third category consists of forms expressing personal perspective, suchas personal and reflexive pronouns, and grammatical aspect. For Smith (2003), these
various types of linguistic cues of subjectivity should be categorized into four
classes: communication (verbs such as say, ask, request, confess), contents of mind
(verbs such as believe, assume), evaluation and evidentials (anyway, still, but, andrespectively, frankly, clearly, surprising, seem) and perception and perspectival cues
32 C. Grisot
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(direct and inferred perception, temporal and spatial deictics, reflexive and
possessive pronouns, and the imperfective viewpoint). I think that her classification
of sources of subjectivity is a useful tool for the type of analysis I am interested in.
This research targets verbal tenses and grammatical aspect, which are listed in
Smith’s fourth category. For this reason, in the present analysis I disregard the first
three categories, which should be considered in further research.
In this research, the account of subjectivity is based on previous descriptions and
proposals and on empirical validation through offline experiments with linguistic
judgment task. According to Smith (2003), subjectivity should be used as a generic
term that integrates the notions of perspective and viewpoint. Here, I follow Smith
and use subjectivity as a generic term for all subjective manifestations, be it
grammatical, lexical or discursive. I use the notion of viewpoint to refer to cases
when subjectivity is closely related to grammatical aspect (perfective vs.
imperfective) and the notion of perspective for cases when subjectivity is linked
to the category of tense.
We define subjectivity as the speaker’s viewpoint, psychological perspective andperceptions, which might or might not be included in the description of a situation orseries of situations. Hence, the speaker is the responsible source (Smith 2003),
which can be the author (as in fiction) or the communicator/participant in the text
situation, and the locus of effect (in Pit’s terminology) of subjectivity. In subjective
sentences, the description of a situation or series of situations is centred on the
speaker’s subjectivity. In non-subjective sentences, the speaker describes a situation
or series of situations without including her viewpoint, psychological perspective
and perceptions. This definition of subjectivity was operationalized in this study as
the [±subjectivity] feature.
Experimental Work
The speaker’s ability to judge subjectivity was tested experimentally for French and
English verbal tenses expressing past time, and for grammatical aspect in Serbian.
In this study, I tested hypotheses formulated based on previous research regarding
subjective and non-subjective usages of French and English verbal tenses and of
grammatical aspect. Therefore, I tested these same languages. Explicitly, the first
studies that proposed a link between subjectivity and verbal tenses focused on the
French passe simple and imparfait and the English simple past (Banfield 1982;
Fleischman 1990, 1995; Sthioul 1998, 2000). As for Serbian, it is one of the two
Slavic languages investigated in the first empirical study investigating the relation
between subjectivity and grammatical aspect expressed morphologically (Trnavac
2006).
In this study, three experiments were carried out, in which native speakers were
asked to judge whether occurrences of target verbal tenses (as described below)
express or not the speaker’s subjectivity:
● Experiment 1 English simple past (SP) and the [±subjectivity] feature.
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 33
123
● Experiment 2 French passe compose (PC), passe simple (PS) and imparfait
(IMP) and the [±subjectivity] feature.
● Experiment 3 Serbian grammatical aspect and the [±subjectivity] feature.
The main hypothesis is that in the interpretation process, the hearer makes
inferences regarding the speaker’s subjective perspective on the eventualities
described (states and events) based on the information provided by verbal tenses and
grammatical aspect. If subjectivity is triggered by linguistic markers analysed, I
expect to find statistically significant correlations between the French IMP and the
imperfective aspect in Serbian and subjective interpretations, as well as between the
French PC and PS, the English SP and the perfective aspect in Serbian and non-
subjective interpretations. By contrast, if subjectivity is not triggered by linguistic
cues, and therefore, it is a pragmatic feature, the results of the experiments will not
show statistically significant correlations between verbal tenses, grammatical aspect
and the two values of the [±subjectivity] feature.
Methodology and Procedure
The experimental work carried out follows the design of what is called sense-annotation experiments in the field of Computational Linguistics (CL). Roughly,
this method consists in asking two or more native speakers to categorize sentences
or excerpts into two or more theoretical categories according to certain annotation
guidelines. This method is used in CL to produce human annotated resources, which
are further considered as gold-standard data2 for training, testing and evaluating the
performances of automatic tools. In order to create this perfect human annotated
data, it is required that annotators have very high agreement rates. Several solutions
have been proposed by scholars (e.g. Bayerl and Paul 2011; Spooren and Degand
2010; Scholman et al. 2016) in order to increase the agreement rates, such as
(i) intensifying the training when participants are inexperienced, also called naïvespeakers (ii) use highly skilled and experienced annotators, (iii) do the annotation in
several phases, or (iv) use several types of post hoc techniques such as the doublecoding (that is, the discussion of disagreements and explicitation of the judgments
made) and one-coder-does-all (that is, one annotator is responsible for coding the
entire corpus). For example, Wiebe et al. (1999) developed a gold-standard data set
for subjectivity. In their study, subjectivity was defined with respect to Smith’s
(2003) third class of sources, that is evaluation and evidentiality. In order to increase
inter-annotator agreement rates, two of the annotators were the researchers
themselves and two other highly trained speakers. The annotation procedure
consisted of several steps, in which annotators returned to the data several times.
Following this procedure, inter-annotator agreement rate was moderate.
However, my suggestion is that this kind of experiments may be used as well to
investigate naıve speakers’ intuitions about a linguistic or pragmatic phenomenon,
2 Gold standard data refers to trustworthy and reliable annotated data, generally coming from human
annotation experiments and used for training and meaningful evaluation of algorithms in Machine
Learning. More generally, gold standard refers to scientific procedures or collections which are accepted
standards (Wissler et al. 2014).
34 C. Grisot
123
without necessarily aiming at producing gold-standard data. One advantage of this
type of experiment is that it is ecological because it reduces the degree of
artificiality that characterizes the more classical type of experiments originating in
psychology both with respect to the procedure and to the experimental items. There
are two drawbacks to sense-annotation experiments and the evaluation of their
results. The first is agreement by chance and the second is annotator bias. I willdiscuss them below.
Agreement by chance refers to the amount of agreement we would expect to
occur by chance, that is, if annotators made a decision without taking into account
the annotation guidelines. This amount depends on the number and the frequency of
categories to be assigned. For example, for two equally frequent categories there are
50% of chances that when one annotator makes a decision, the second one makes
the same decision. In order to avoid this problem, chance-corrected statistical
coefficients can be used to measure inter-annotator agreement rates. These
coefficients calculate the agreement due to chance and the agreement which goes
beyond chance level. This study provides the results of the experiments as evaluated
with one the most frequent measures used in CL, which is the kappa coefficient
(henceforth, Қ) (Carletta 1996). Its values range between 0 (lack of agreement other
than due to chance) to 1 (perfect agreement).
The second drawback of sense-annotation experiments refers to the fact that the
annotators may apply individual annotation strategies. For a study in which
annotation experiments are used to investigate the speakers’ intuitions regarding the
phenomenon of interest, annotator bias in itself is not necessarily problematic. As
Spooren and Degand (2010, 254) point out when speaking about the one-coder-does-all strategy,
Of course the coding will be subject to individual strategies developed by the
coder, but these strategies will presumably be systematic and there is no
reason to assume that such strategies will be conflated with the phenomenon of
interest. […] So if our research question is whether judgements3 occur more
often with want than with omdat¸ an overcoding of judgments will not impede
answer to the research question.
This means that the annotator’s strategy corresponds to his/her way of understand-
ing the phenomenon of interest. The problem of annotator bias, which is a measure
for variance in the data, comes from the fact that it influences the way in which
chance-corrected agreement is calculated. In other words, the value of the
coefficient slightly depends on how chance-corrected agreement is calculated [cf.
Artstein and Poesio (2008) for a more detailed technical discussion]. When there are
more than two annotators, the effect of the variance of their individual annotation
strategies on the value of the chance-corrected coefficient becomes more similar to
random noise.
3 Here, the authors make reference to Sanders and Spooren’s (2009) study in which they annotated two
Dutch connectives: omdat, which is most frequently used in objective causal relations (that is, they
express causality between events in the real world), and want, which is considered to be a prototypical
marker of subjective causal relations holding between the speaker’s conclusions on the basis of events in
the world (Degand and Pander Maat 2003; Pit 2003; Canestrelli et al. 2013).
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 35
123
All the three experiments discussed in this paper were carried out following
similar procedures. Participants received annotation guidelines (cf. Appendix for the
English version), which included the definition of subjectivity, the definition of
subjective and non-subjective sentences, Smith’s (2003) fourth category of sources
of subjectivity, and examples for each type of source. They passed through training
on 7–10 occurrences of the target verbal tense, in which disagreements were
discussed in a debriefing session. The debriefing session was an open discussion, in
which the annotator(s) explained their decisions for each disagreement case and
verified if they understood the annotation guidelines correctly. They annotated the
data by working independently. The disagreements were not discussed after the
annotation experiments. Since there were three or more participants for each
experiment, pairwise agreement and mean Қ values were calculated (using the Қvalues for each pair of annotators). Pairwise agreement for each item is the
“proportion of agreeing judgement pairs out of the total number of judgement pairs
for that item” (Artstein and Poesio 2008, 562). In other words, for each occurrences
of the target verbal tense, the majority of decisions given by the annotators for that
item was calculated. Experiments 1 and 2 were preceded by pilot experiments,
which were carried out following the same procedure as in the experiments
themselves.
The data used in the first two experiments is corpus data. All the data was
randomly chosen from the two parallel corpora built by Grisot (2015). The first is
the English-French parallel corpus, containing texts written in English and their
translations into French. The second is the French–English parallel corpus,
containing texts written in French and their translations into English. Except for
the English-Serbian sub-corpus, translations were not made for research purposes.
Translation corpora were used instead of comparable corpora for two reasons. The
first is that they make it possible to control for the cotext and context across
languages, which are relevant parameters for judging subjectivity. The second is
that they give access to cross-linguistic semantic and pragmatic equivalences for
specific linguistic expressions (Dyvik 1998; Noel 2003). Each occurrences of the
target verbal tense consisted of a short excerpt, as in examples (8)–(9), (14)–(19)
and (20)–(23), for which the context provided was considered sufficient for judging
the [±subjectivity] feature and its triggering by the linguistic cues investigated.
Both parallel corpora contain texts of three stylistic registers in equivalent
proportions: literature, journalistic and discussions from the European Parliament
(the Europarl corpus4). The texts were randomly chosen from existing multilingual
corpora or already existing translations of the original texts, as follows. The
literature sub-corpus contains texts from The portrait of Mr. W. H. by O. Wilde,
Sense and sensibility by J. Austen, Le petit prince by A. St. Exupery, Cinq semainesen ballon and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers by J. Verne. The journalistic sub-
corpus contains texts from the News Commentaries corpus, Time Magazine,VoxEurop and Le monde diplomatique. The Europarl sub-corpus contains texts fromthe Europarl corpus (Koehn 2005). Finally, the data used in Experiment 3 contains
randomly selected examples from the SP sub-corpus (originating in the English-
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 43
123
precisely, according to her, the imperfective viewpoint expresses subjectivity
whereas the perfective viewpoint does not. In this experiment, I tested this
prediction.
There were three participants (a man and two women, age mean 38, range 19–
50), who did not have prior knowledge of linguistics. They are Serbian native
speakers and live in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The three of them
have a university degree. It was the first time they participated in this type of
experiment. They received a small amount of money for their participation.
The material used consisted of 109 excerpts randomly chosen from the Serbian
side of Grisot’s (2015) multilingual corpus (23% of the total number of excerpts in
this corpus). The excerpts were similar to those of examples (20)–(23). Grammatical
aspect was distributed as follows: 54 perfectives and 55 imperfectives. The material
contained 25 excerpts from the Europarl sub-corpus, 33 from the Journalistic sub-
corpus and 51 from the Literature sub-corpus. For all the excerpts, Serbian had the
status of translated language.
The experiment was carried out according to the procedure described in
“Methodology and procedure” section. The evaluation of the results was performed
by calculating pairwise agreement for each item and the Қ value for each pair of
annotators. The annotators were asked to say if the grammatical aspect morpheme
was decisive for their judgement, and if that was not the case, on what basis they
made the decision (linguistic cues, contextual cues or general world knowledge).
The results are as follows. The mean Қ value is 0.4 (0.36 for the pair A1–A2,
0.43 for the pair A1–A3 and 0.41 for the pair A2–A3). Pairwise agreement analysis
of the 109 excerpts judged showed that both the perfective and the imperfective
grammatical aspects are more frequently associated with subjective interpretations
(76% of the cases for the imperfective and 54% of the cases for the perfective), as
illustrated by examples in (20)–(23). The pair of examples (20) and (21) illustrate
imperfective non-subjective and imperfective subjective interpretations, whereas the
pair of examples (22) and (23) illustrate perfective non-subjective and perfective
subjective interpretations.
(20) Iako su SAD videle Musarafa kao vrsioca promene, on nikad nije dosegao
unutrasnji politicki legitimitet, a na njegovu politiku su gledali kao na
opsirnu i protivurecnu.
‘Although the US viewed Musharraf as an agent of change, he has never
achieved domestic political legitimacy, and his policies were seen as rife
with contradictions.’
(21) Bio je izrazito lep, prelep. Ljudi koji ga nisu voleli, filistri i ucitelji i crkvenimladici bi govorili da je bio samo lep.
‘He certainly was wonderfully handsome. People who did not like him,
philistines and college tutors, and young men reading for the Church, used
to say that he was merely pretty.’
(22) Gospodine predsednice, kada se radi o stavki 11 zapisnika o poslovanju,
juce smo se složili da danas na dnevnom redu bude Burlanzov izvestaj.
‘Mr President, concerning item 11 of the Minutes on the order of business,
we agreed yesterday to have the Bourlanges report on today’s agenda.’
44 C. Grisot
123
(23) Zeleo bih, takođe, da se zahvalim premijeru koji me je počastvovao time sto
me je zamolio da premestim adresu u odgovoru u govor sa prestola.
‘I would also like to thank the Prime Minister, who honoured me by asking
me to move the Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne.’
The same analysis conducted only on the 63 occurrences of the perfective and
imperfective aspects for which the three annotators made the same judgement
(perfect agreement) shows that 90% of the imperfectives were judged as subjective
whereas 57% of the perfectives were judged as non-subjective. This distribution is
statistically significant (χ2 = 13.77, df = 1, p \ 0.05). A qualitative analysis was
performed on the justifications provided by the participants for their decisions for
each experimental item. Among the most frequent type of explanations were
factuality, modality, world knowledge, perception and grammatical aspect.
Although a statistically significant correlation was found between [±subjectivity]
and grammatical aspect, it does not seem to the main source of information used by
the participants for making their decisions (Table 6).
The results of the analysis of subjective and non-subjective usages of Serbian
perfective and imperfective grammatical aspects as analysed with respect to the
stylistic register are provided in Table 7. Using a Chi Square test, this distribution is
shown not to be statistically significant (χ2 = 5.87, df = 2, p = 0.0531).
To conclude, these three experiments show that subjectivity seems to be a
heterogeneous phenomenon, which is interpreted at the global level and which is not
directly triggered by the linguistic sources investigated in this paper. The results of
Experiment 3 may be interpreted as a correlation between [±subjectivity] and
grammatical aspect, which may or may not involve a causal relationship. I will
discuss the status of subjectivity as a pragmatic feature in “Subjectivity: a pragmatic
feature” section.
Subjectivity: A Pragmatic Feature
Discussion of Results
In general, statistically not significant results (p [ 0.05) and low Қ values
(Қ \ 0.7) are interpreted as inconclusive. They may point either to the
inappropriateness of the design of the experiment or to the lack of evidence for
rejecting the null H0 hypothesis for the value of p and for considering that the data is
Table 6 Grammatical aspect
and subjectivity in 63 perfect
agreements
Subjective Non-subjective Total
Abs. Freq. (%) Abs. Freq. (%)
Imperfective 36 90 4 10 40
Perfective 10 43 13 57 23
Total 46 17 63
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 45
123
reliable for Қ values. The methodology and the design of the experiments discussed
in this research have been previously validated for other types of information, such
the [±narrativity] feature (referring to temporal ordering of eventualities) and the
[±boundedness] feature (referring to bounded or unbounded eventualities) among
others (cf. Grisot 2015). For this reason, I will consider that the low Қ values are
informative.
Experiment 1 showed that subjectivity is a feature hard to pin down for native
speakers of English. This applies both to cases where the list of sources consisted of
all four categories proposed by Smith (2003) and when it consisted only of the
fourth category. Experiment 2 indicated that in French the [±subjectivity] feature is
identifiable by native speakers. The agreement rate reaches its limit at a Қ value of
0.3. This value remains constant whether two or more judges participate in the
experiment. When the agreements are analysed, they indicate that French verbal
tenses expressing past time are not specialized for one of the two values of the
[±subjectivity] feature: the IMP and the PS are preferred for expressing the
speaker’s subjective perspective whereas the PC is preferred for describing a
situation in a non-subjective manner.
The results of Experiments 1 and 2 question the link that has been made in the
literature between the [±subjectivity] feature and verbal tenses. The English SP and
the French PS were expected to have non-subjective usages, hence allowing the
speaker to describe a situation or a series of situations without including her
subjective perspective and viewpoint. Based on these experiments, this hypothesis
was shown to be too strong. The opposite hypothesis was made in the literature for
the IMP. Experiments 2 indicated that in the data containing 65 perfect agreements
(judgements made by 5 annotators) the IMP was judged as having both subjective
(64%) and non-subjective (36%) usages. When the status of language was
considered, that is source vs. target, it was found that verbal tenses have the same
behaviour in a text written originally in French and in a text written in another
language and translated into French.
Experiment 3, which targeted grammatical aspect in Serbian, indicated that
subjectivity is identifiable by native speakers with a Қ value above 0.4. Subjective
and non-subjective interpretations of a sentence are correlated with imperfective vs.
perfective grammatical aspects (χ2 = 13.77, df = 1, p \ 0.05). However, the
experiment did not provide evidence for a deterministic relation of the type
imperfective → subjective and perfective → non-subjective. These results are
similar to Trnavac’s (2006) corpus study in English, Dutch, Serbian and Russian,
Table 7 Distribution of
subjective and non-subjective
usages of Serbian grammatical
aspect by type of sub-corpus
Subjective Non-subjective Total
Abs. freq. (%) Abs. freq. (%)
Europarl 15 60 10 71 25
Journalistic 17 52 16 71 33
Literature 39 76 12 38 51
Total 71 38 109
46 C. Grisot
123
according to which the four combinations of the two variables and their levels are
possible.
The analyses per sub-corpus in each experiment showed that participants were
sensitive to stylistic register. For English, the source of significance of the observed
distribution is the literary register whereas for French it is the journalistic register.
As for Serbian, the distribution of the subjective and non-subjective judgments was
shown not to be statistically significant.
Based on Experiments 1–3, I suggest that subjectivity is a highly context- and
language-dependent feature. It might arise in French and in English through
pragmatic inference (Қ values below 0.4). In English, however, the [±subjectivity]
feature seems to be particularly difficult to identify based on the linguistic cues
investigated in this research. Using a larger array of linguistic sources, such as the
four classes of markers proposed by Smith (2003), has a positive impact on
identifying subjectivity. As for Serbian, two possible scenarios can be identified.
The first is that the [±subjectivity] feature is procedurally triggered by grammatical
aspect, hence through the notion of viewpoint which is stipulated in grammar. The
second is that the correlation found between subjectivity and grammatical aspect
does not involve a causal relation between the two (scenario supported by the
participants’ explanations of their decisions). Further experimental research is
required in order to investigate these two scenarios. At this point, it can be suggested
that subjectivity is not a local phenomenon, i.e. which is not identifiable locally by
looking at linguistic sources such as those included in Smith’s (2003) fourth
category. However, in order to validate this suggestion, further research should test
the other three categories given by Smith (2003). Subjectivity might therefore be a
global phenomenon whose specific sources are not identifiable. When a subjective
point of perspective is identified in the utterance, its presence ‘contaminates’ the
whole utterance and influences the interpretation of verbal tenses, grammatical
aspect and indexical markers (Kuno and Kaburaki 1975, 2004; Grisot 2017).
A Pragmatic Model for Verbal Tenses and Subjectivity
Moeschler et al. (2012) and Moeschler (2016) propose the mixed conceptual-procedural model of verbal tenses (MCPM). The MCPM is based on a classical
Reichenbachian analysis of verbal tenses (Reichenbach 1947), supplemented by
further pragmatic features. The use of temporal coordinates S (speech moment), R
(reference point) and E (event moment), as well as temporal relations of precedence
and simultaneity (both co-extensional and inclusive) provide a general template for
tense system distinguishing between two sub-systems: one for past tenses and the
other for present and future tenses (Moeschler 2016, 130).
The MCPM predicts six pragmatic uses of verbal tenses, based on the following
hierarchy of features: [±narrative] [ [±subjective] [ [±explicit]. Firstly, the
[±narrative] feature refers to whether or not temporal ordering is obtained by use of
the current verbal tense. Secondly, the [±subjective] denotes the presence or the
absence of a viewpoint or a psychological perspective in the description of a
situation or series of situation. Finally, the [±explicit] feature signals whether the
perspective is explicitly mentioned or implicitly accessed.
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 47
123
Moeschler et al. (2012) suggested that the [±narrative] and the [±subjective]
features are procedural information encoded by verbal tenses. In Grisot (2015), I
show that the procedural nature of the first feature was validated experimentally by
looking at the simple past (in English, French, Romanian and Italian), the compound
past and the imperfect (in French, Romanian and Italian). Offline experiments with
linguistic judgement task, which had the same procedure as in the three experiments
described in this article, were carried out. More precisely, for the [±narrative]
feature, inter-annotator agreement rates were above 0.4 in all four languages
investigated. According to the scale proposed in Grisot (2014), this value signals
that the information judged is procedural. Moeschler et al. (2012) argue in favour of
a similar treatment for the [±subjective] feature: it is procedural information
encoded by verbal tenses and it represents the instruction for the hearer to look for a
perspective/viewpoint on the eventuality expressed. The perspective/viewpoint can
be explicit (i.e. expressed lexically) or implicit (i.e. inferred contextually).
Other scholars, such as Saussure and Sthioul (1999, 2005), Boogaart (2007) and
Saussure (2013), adopt a similar position with respect to the procedurally encoded
nature of the notions of perspective and viewpoint. However, they provide different
arguments. Boogaart (2007) proposed that modal and subjective readings of the
imperfect in Romance languages are due to specific instantiations of its underlying
anaphoric semantics. More precisely, this concerns the dependence of the imperfect
on another verbal tense in the discourse, which can provide it with a reference point
R. Hence, the imperfect would impose the constraint that the event or state be
simultaneous to some previously established R (E = R). Saussure (2013) provides a
more detailed formula, given in (24), which describes this procedure encoded by the
IMP. (24) is read as ‘the reference point R, inherited from some other sentence with
a perfective past or a punctual adverb, is situated inside on ongoing eventuality R,
[…] and R precedes S’ (Saussure 2013, 49).
(24) R ⊂ E & R-S
The reference point R can be instantiated as a subjective point of perspective or a
point of evaluation for the truth-conditional content of the clause. When R is
saturated as a subjective point of perspective, the imperfect has a subjective modal
interpretation. For example, in (25) the IMP’s R is given by the event presented in
the preceding discourse, which is a PS in this case. The PS’s R is a point of
perspective in which John notices the room was dark. It can be identified by means
of pragmatic inferencing: it was probably dark before, at and after the moment in
which John entered the room.
(25) Jean entra dans la chambre. Il faisait noir comme dans un four.
John entered.PS the room. It was.IMP pitch dark.
‘John entered the room. It was pitch dark.’
Sausure and Sthioul (1999, 2005) and Saussure (2013) suggest that for narrative,
counterfactual and indirect-speech subjective usages of the IMP, R is saturated by a
moment at which a third party perceives the eventuality as being in the course of
48 C. Grisot
123
happening. In these subjective usages, the procedure encoded by the IMP changes
from (24) to (26), where the variable to saturate is not R anymore but S’, which is a
projected non-egocentric deictic point, and this projected non-egocentric deictic
point saturated as a third-party perspective P precedes S.
(26) S’ ⊂ E & P-S
The experimental work presented in this article does not seem to provide
evidence supporting this hypothesis with respect to French verbal tenses. As
discussed above, a deterministic relation between a verbal tense and one of the two
possible interpretations: subjective or non-subjective was not found. Based on the
value of the Қ coefficient, I suggest that this information is, in French, recovered
through context-dependent general pragmatic inferences. However, this interpreta-
tion should be nuanced for two reasons.
The first is that the procedural account proposed by Moeschler et al. (2012),
Sausure and Sthioul (1999, 2005) and Saussure (2013) does not make the prediction
of a deterministic relation. On the contrary, they give examples of cases in which
the IMP (but also the PC and the PS) has non-subjective usages corresponding to the
prototypical background and descriptive IM, and non-prototypical subjective
usages, corresponding to non-background usages, such as narrative IMP, counter-
factual and indirect-discourse usages. In Experiment 2, the IMP was judged as
having subjective and non-subjective usages. However, the judgement in terms of
subjectivity is not dependent on prototypical and non-prototypical usages of the
IMP.
The second reason is that the data used in these experiments is corpus data, which
might be less straightforward to judge than artificial data. A difference in the
complexity of linguistic judgements involving corpus data vs. artificial data was
also found for other types of linguistic information. For example, in Grisot (2015) I
show that a simple task like conjugating a verbal tense provided in the infinitive is
more difficult for corpus data than for artificial data. When performing this task on
36 artificial sentences the two judges agreed on all the items (Қ = 1), whereas when
performing on 90 sentences from a corpus, they agreed on the correct label in 93.3%
of the cases (Қ = 0.86). Similar observations were made for connectives. Cartoni
et al. (2013) show that, if intuitively speakers agree on the various senses (i.e.
contextual usages) of the French alors que ‘while’ and of the English while, whenthey are asked to identify these senses by looking at natural data, the task is more
difficult. In their annotation experiments, inter-annotator agreement rates did not go
beyond the Қ of value of 0.42, and this both for alors que and for while.Based on these observations, it is possible that the Қ value of 0.3 from
Experiment 2 is actually due to the fact that the data is only natural data, and not to
the fact that subjectivity is recovered through general pragmatic inferences. In order
to determine this, the same experiment should be carried out on artificial data as
well. This corresponds to one of the requirements given in Grisot (2014) for using
the Қ scale with respect to the conceptual/procedural distinction: both natural and
artificial data must be used in the experiment in order to control for variation
coming from the type of data.
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 49
123
Furthermore, the results of Experiment 3 indicate that in Serbian subjectivity is
correlated to grammatical viewpoint. As noted above, based on the current results, it
cannot be established whether this correlation involves a causal relationship. The Қvalue of 0.4 could be interpreted as signalling that the information judged is
procedural information. As in the other experiments, the data tested is natural data.
Hence, one might expect to have a higher value if artificial data was tested as well.
If the [±subjectivity] feature is encoded by grammatical viewpoint, this might
explain the results of the qualitative analysis of the explanations provided by French
native speakers, according to which imperfective and perfective viewpoints were
relevant for their judgment of French verbal tenses in terms of subjectivity.
However, further experimental research is required in order to determine if a causal
relation of a procedural nature exists between subjectivity and grammatical aspect.
Conclusion
In this paper, I investigated the notion of subjectivity, operationalized as the
[±subjectivity] feature, in offline experiments with a linguistic judgement task. It
was tested by looking at English and French verbal tenses expressing past time, and
at grammatical aspect expressed morphologically in Serbian.
Evidence in favour of a high context- and language-dependent status of this
feature was found. More precisely, native speakers of English found it very difficult
to deal with this feature. Native speakers of French had better results at the task than
English speakers, and used perspectival and perception cues for identifying
subjective and non-subjective usages of French verbal tenses. Finally, native
speakers of Serbian performed better than French speakers at the task when they
used information coming from grammatical aspect. The experiments were carried
out only on corpus data, and I made the suggestion that low agreement rates might
also be due to the complexity of the corpus data compared to artificial data.
This research pointed out the great complexity of subjectivity, for which further
systematic research is required in order to have a clearer picture. Consequently, I
propose a series of future lines of inquiry and possible improvements of the current
study, which can be summarized as follows. Firstly, there are two methodological
issues regarding the material and the participants. The first concerns the data.
Natural corpus and translated corpus data should be used along with built data,
which has the advantage of being carefully controlled. The second regards the
participants. They should be native speakers of the same L1 variety of language and
be comparable with respect to their age and their educational background, in order
to control for possible confounds in their assessment of subjectivity.
Secondly, there are a series of methodological suggestions regarding the type of
analyses that could be carried out. For example, a link between aspectual classes
and subjectivity is to be investigated by performing a fine-grained analysis of the
semantics of the verbs used in the excerpts tested in the current experiments. Also,
the role played by the other linguistic cues given in Smith’s (2003) classification for
the expression of subjectivity should be assessed. This suggestion is supported by
the qualitative analysis performed on the participants’ explanations and
50 C. Grisot
123
justifications for their decisions. The range of explanations they gave is very broad
and it goes beyond the linguistic sources given in the annotation guidelines. This
could be interpreted as evidence in favour a global account, rather than a local one,
of subjectivity. Additionally, the potential causal relation between subjectivity and
grammatical aspect should be investigated on the basis of more classic experimental
paradigms, in which variables are carefully manipulated in order to test their effect
on the variable of interest.
Finally, there are two theoretical issues that should be further considered. The
first is defining the concept of subjectivity in a different framework than the
linguistic and pragmatic approach chosen in this study. As mentioned in “Different
approaches to subjectivity” section, the tools provided by Langacker’s framework
such as the construal relationship, the conceptualizer and object of conceptualiza-
tion and their relation to the ground, might provide new insights into the study of
subjectivity. The second issue is linked to the definition of subjectivity as referring
to the speaker’s psychological perspective and viewpoint. In a discourse, a third
party’s psychological perspective and viewpoint can be expressed which might be
different than the speaker’s own subjectivity.
Appendix
Annotation guidelines.
Introduction
It has been suggested in the linguistics literature that language has two functions:
1. Participate at the functioning of human mind.
2. Communicate speaker’s psychological attitudes.
I am interested in what can be called subjectivity and its expression in language.
Subjectivity can be defined as the speaker’s psychological perspective andperceptions included into the description of a situation.
Explanation
With respect to this definition, sentences can be subjective or not subjective(objective).
● A sentence is subjective when the description of a situation or a series of
situations is centred on the speaker’s psychological perspective.
● A sentence is not subjective when the speaker merely reports a situation or a
series of situations that are related in the world.
There are some linguistic cues that help us identify subjectivity. Most often, more
than one sentence is needed to identify if a sentence is objective or subjective. For
Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An… 51
123
all three cases, it is the sentence/verb in italics where the object of perception is
expressed which should be judged as subjective. The sentence/verb in italics where
the perceiver is expressed is not subjective.
● The type of perception.
● Direct (a verb of seeing or hearing introduces a complement which expresses
the object of the perception).
● I saw Mary walk to school. She got there in 10 min.
● I saw Mary walking to school. She looked happy.
● Contextual (such as cases where the first sentence presents the perceiver and
the second sentence conveys the object of the perception).
● Gabriel smiles at the three syllables she had given his surname and
glanced at her. She was slim, growling girl, pale in complexion and with
hay-colored hair.
● Inferred (cases where the situation implies a perception due to world
knowledge).
● Mary had been working hard all day. Now she was ready to stop.
● Perspectival cues:
● Temporal and spatial deictics: now, there● Reflexive and possessive pronouns: her, herself● Imperfective viewpoint: was playing
(1) Mary played in the sandbox. Storm clouds covered the sky. She ran to
the forest (this is a non-subjective description)
(2) Mary was playing in the sandbox. Storm clouds were covering the sky.Was it going to rain? What will she do now? Should she stay there orrun to the forest? (this is a subjective description)
(3) Mary was playing in the sandbox with her brother. Storm clouds werecovering the sky. She was asking herself what to do. (this is a
subjective description)
Task
For each excerpt, we are interested in the verb written in italics. Please read each
excerpt and decide if the verb in bold has a subjective or a non-subjective usage, as
they are described above.
52 C. Grisot
123
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