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Exploring Telicity and Transitivity in Primordial Thought Language and Body Boundary Imagery

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Abstract

Linguistics research on ‘unconscious knowledge’ related to the right brain-hemisphere represents a shift from the prevalent scientific investigation of the linguistic processes of grammatical structures associated with the dominant ‘verbal’ left brain-hemisphere. This study explores the relationship among primordial thought language, body boundary awareness and syntactic features—i.e. telicity, perfectivity and transitivity—in autobiographical narratives of everyday and dream memories. The results showed that event descriptions with atelic predicates and intransitive structures were more frequent in dream recall than in narratives of everyday memories. Primordial thought language and body boundary awareness, however, decreased with atelic predicates and transitive structures, which might indicate both the tendency of events to describe result states, such as achievements and accomplishments, as a means to bring about an unconscious wish fulfilment and the emphasis on event arguments to be realised without the inclusion of an external object. In narratives of everyday memories, penetration imagery increased with imperfective verb forms and decreased with perfective verb forms, and emotion lexis increased with atelic predicates and transitive structures, but not in dream memories.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my research assistant Bart Modderkolk, to my supervisor Dr. Andrew Wilson and also to Dr. Daniël Van Olmen for their help and support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Laura A. Cariola

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  1. Laura A. Cariola
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Correspondence to Laura A. Cariola.

Appendix

Appendix

See Appendix Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2 Semantic categories and examples of primary and secondary process language in the RID (Martindale 1975a, 1990)
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Table 3 Semantic categories and examples of barrier and penetration imagery in the BTD (Wilson 2006), including all clothing items, vehicles and buildings
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Cariola, L.A. Exploring Telicity and Transitivity in Primordial Thought Language and Body Boundary Imagery. J Psycholinguist Res 43, 683–697 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-013-9272-4

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