Abstract
Since Haiman's pioneering work in 1980s (e.g. 1980), the notion of iconicity has been a recurrent topic in linguistic theory. Tense iconicity is a subtype of structural iconicity, roughly expressing the idea that the temporal order of events is reflected in discourse structure.
Among other accounts, this principle has been recently shown to influence the ordering of English temporal clauses (Diessel 2008). Givón 1985 claims that in the course of language development iconicity gives way to grammar.
On the other hand, iconicity is argued to be favored in non-standard processing situations (learning and acquisition, language contact, language impairment) (Ramat 1995). I will present the design and preliminary results of an experiment devised to test the effects of tense iconicity on sentence processing using contrasting Czech sentences.
In a simple task, participants will decide if a given sentence corresponds to temporal relations in a picture sequence. The experiment will be presented to aphasic speakers of Czech and healthy controls.
While healthy speakers are expected to perform equally well on both types of sentences, the iconic sentences are expected to facilitate the processing in persons with aphasia. Relevant corpus data will also be presented.