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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

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Abstract In this paper, I investigate experimentally the question of subjectivity and

its supposed triggering by the categories of tense and grammatical aspect. The study

is carried out in the relevance theoretic pragmatic framework, which assumes that

certain linguistic expressions encode procedural information constraining the

determination of the explicit content of an utterance (that is, the explicature), and of

the implicatures (that is, implicit premises and implicit conclusions). In the current

state of the art, the notion of subjectivity, which roughly means the expression of a

point of view or perspective, has been correlated to a series of linguistic expressions,

such as deictic elements (personal, spatial, temporal), grammatical aspect and

connectives. Here, I examine the relation between subjectivity and two parameters

of temporal reference: verbal tenses and grammatical aspect. Annotation experi-

ments were carried out on corpus data in English, French and Serbian in order to test

whether native speakers are able to consciously identify and evaluate information

about subjectivity in corpus data. Based on the results of these experiments and

using the notion of (specific) procedural versus general (pragmatic) inference, I

discuss the status of subjectivity as semantic (encoded procedural information) or

pragmatic (general inferential) information, and give evidence in favour of the

latter.

Keywords Subjectivity · Verbal tenses · Grammatical aspect · Corpus data ·

Annotation experiments · Cross-linguistic study

& Cristina Grisot

[email protected]

1 Department of Linguistics, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

2 Cognitive Science Centre, University of Neuchatel, Neuchatel, Switzerland

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Corpus Pragmatics (2018) 2:27–55

https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-017-0021-z

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s41701-017-0021-z&domain=pdf

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s41701-017-0021-z&domain=pdf

Introduction

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)

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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

Discourse (FID) (Banfield, 1982/1995; Reboul 1992; Schlenker 2004; Reboul et al.

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

1982, 1995; Traugott 1989, 1995, 1999; Sthioul 2000; Tahara 2000; Saussure

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

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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

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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.


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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.


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● 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

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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).


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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-

4 Available at http://www.statmt.org/europarl/.

36 C. Grisot

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http://www.statmt.org/europarl/

French parallel corpus), which was translated into Serbian by a Serbian native

speaker, who was not aware of the way in which the translation was going to be

used. The decision to produce an English-French-Serbian parallel corpus is justified

by the lack of an already existing multilingual corpus, in which these three

languages are represented.

The Қ coefficient was used to evaluate the results regarding the type of

information encoded by the feature tested, more precisely, procedural (specific

inference triggered by a linguistic marker) or purely pragmatic (general non-

demonstrative inference). In Grisot (2014), I propose a scale for interpreting inter-

annotator agreement rates measured with the Қ coefficient with respect to the type

of linguistic or pragmatic information that is dealt with. More precisely, the scale

and its interpretation is the following:

● High agreement (indicative minimal threshold for Қ values 0.7) signal that the

information judged is easily accessible to consciousness and available to

conscious thought, hence it is conceptual information.

● Medium agreement (indicative thresholds for Қ values 0.4–0.7) signal that the

information judged is not easily accessible to consciousness and available to

conscious thought, hence it is procedural information.

● Low agreement (indicative maximal threshold for Қ values 0.4) signal that the

information judged depends uniquely on contextual hypotheses that the

addressee formulates, hence it is purely pragmatic information recovered

through non-demonstrative inferences.

This scale is based on a series of annotation experiments targeting verbal tenses

(Grisot 2014, 2015). Their results have indicated that systematically when

participants deal with the conceptual meaning of a linguistic expression, they have

no difficulties in consciously evaluating it, that it is available to conscious thought

and it is easily expressed in conceptual terms. On the other hand, when they deal

with the procedural meaning encoded by a linguistic expression, the procedure is

automatically executed regardless of the contextual assumptions. This procedure

leads to a specific pragmatic inference whose result depends on the contextual

assumptions formulated. Consciously evaluating this type of meaning, which is not

available to consciousness, is a rather difficult task for the annotators. This is shown

by their systematic behaviour when judging procedural information: the inter-

annotator agreement rates measured with Қ are between 0.4 and 0.7. For example, in

Grisot (2015) I show that two experiments carried out using the same protocol as

that presented in this paper confirmed theoretical proposals regarding the type of

meaning encoded by grammatical and lexical aspect. More precisely, it is suggested

that grammatical aspect encodes procedural information whereas lexical aspect

referring to ontological types of situations encodes conceptual information (cf.

Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti 2011). When grammatical and lexical aspects are

judged in annotation experiments, annotators’ behaviour is completely different. For

the former, they had difficulty in consciously thinking of what perfective and

imperfective aspects mean and in identifying them for verbal tenses in a language

where they are not morphologically expressed. For the latter, annotators were able


123

to identify the type of situation verbal phrases express with very high agreement

rates (Қ value of 0.084). In the debriefing session, all the disagreements were

resolved (Қ value of 1).

Experiment 1

The purpose of this experiment was to test whether subjectivity, as defined in “A

working definition of subjectivity in this study” section, can be identified in English

in a consistent manner by native speakers when they are asked to judge corpus data.

Scholars suggested that when a speaker uses a SP, she describes the situation in an

objective manner, that is, without including her viewpoint, psychological perspec-

tive and perceptions. Assuming that speakers are able to reliably identify

subjectivity when judging sentences containing the SP in English, and that the SP

cannot be used to express subjectivity, then all SP occurrences from the data will be

judged as non-subjective.

There were three participants (3 women, mean age 33, range 19–60), who did not

have prior knowledge of linguistics. They are native speakers of English: annotator

1 comes from New Zealand, annotator 2 from Australia and annotator 3 from

Scotland. The three of them have a university degree. It was the first time that they

participated in this type of experiment. They received a small amount of money for

their participation.

The material used consisted of 99 excerpts containing instances of the SP, which

were randomly chosen from the English side of Grisot (2015) parallel corpus (21%

of the total number of excerpts in this corpus). The excerpts are similar to those

provided below, where the SP written in italics in (8) has a non-subjective usage and

the SP written in italics in (9) has a subjective usage.

(8) The military recently blocked a government move to place Pakistan’s

infamous intelligence service, the ISI, under the control of the interior

minister rather than the prime minister. (Journalistic sub-corpus).

(9) She had an excellent heart—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings

were strong—but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which

her mother had yet to learn; and which one of her sisters had resolved never to

be taught. (Literature sub-corpus).

The material contained 21 excerpts from the Europarl sub-corpus, 31 from the

Journalistic sub-corpus and 47 from the Literature sub-corpus. For all excerpts,

English was the original 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 results are as follows. The mean Қ value is 0.0508 (0.0045 for the pair

A1–A2, 0.0479 for the pair A1–A3 and 0.10 for the pair A2–A3). This Қ value is

close to chance agreement. In other words, in a systematic manner, the annotators

38 C. Grisot

123

did not agree when they were asked to identify subjectivity at it was defined in this

research and use the perspective and perception list of linguistic sources.

After performing pairwise agreement, the SP was judged as being objective in 55

cases (56%) and subjective in 44 cases (44%). The results of the analysis of

subjective and non-subjective usages of the SP with respect to the stylistic register

are given in Table 1. Using a Chi Square test, this distribution is shown to be

statistically significant (χ2 = 10.79, df = 2, p \ 0.05). The analysis of standardized

residuals for each cell shows that the significance comes from the literature register,

where the number of observed non-subjective sentences is smaller than the expected

one whereas the number of subjective sentences is larger than the expected one.

Hence, the judgments performed on the literary texts are statistically different than

the judgements made on the excerpts from the journalistic sub-corpus and the

Europarl sub-corpus.

In 26 cases, all the three annotators agreed on the label provided (that is, they

made the same judgment). Among these, the SP was judged as being objective in 18

cases (69%) and subjective in 8 cases (31%).

Among the SP occurrences that received an identical label, the sources of

subjectivity mentioned by the annotators are very heterogeneous, ranging from

type of discourse, type of perception and type of information (factual or

personal opinion). In very few cases, the judges said that they based their

decision on a perspectival cue given in the annotation guidelines (that is,

temporal or spatial deictics, reflexive and possessive pronouns and imperfective

viewpoint). This qualitative analysis seems to point to the fact that subjectivity

may arise from a large array of linguistic and non-linguistic sources and that it

cannot be reduced to Smith’s fourth class of sources. This was also shown by a

pilot experiment that was carried out following the same methodology and the

same procedure, with two different judges and 60 new excerpts containing SP

occurrences. In the pilot experiment, all of Smith’s (2003) four types of sources

of subjectivity were considered (communication verbs, contents of mind,

evaluation and evidentials, and perception and perspective). The agreement rate

corresponds to a Қ value of 0.22. As it can be seen, when subjectivity is not

reduced only to one type of sources, annotators have slightly better results.

However, this Қ value remains under the threshold of 0.4 from the scale

proposed in Grisot (2014).

Table 1 Distribution of

subjective and non-subjective

usages of the SP type of sub-

corpus

Subjective Non-subjective Total

Abs. freq. Row (%) Abs. freq. Row (%)

Europarl 6 29 15 71 21

Journalistic 9 29 22 71 31

Literature 29 62 18 38 47

Total 44 55 99


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Experiment 2

The purpose of Experiment 2 was to test whether French native speakers are able to

consistently identify subjectivity when judging corpus data containing occurrences

of PS, PC and IMP. The second aim was to test the existing theoretical assumptions

regarding the link between these verbal tenses and subjectivity. Precisely, in the

literature it is suggested that the PS has more frequently a non-subjective usage as in

examples (10) and less frequently a subjective usage as in (11).

(10) Max entra dans le bar. Il alla s’asseoir au fond de la salle.

‘Max entered the bar. He sat in the back.’

(11) Aujourd’hui personne ne lui adressa la parole.

‘Today, nobody talked with him.’

A similar association is made in the literature for the IMP, which arguably has

more frequently subjective usages as in examples (12), and less frequently non-

subjective usages, as in (13) (from Moeschler et al. 2012).

(12) Marie sauta dans le train. Cinq minutes plus tard, le train déraillait.‘Mary jumped in the train. Five minutes later, it was derailing.’

(13) Les dinosaures vivaient il y a des centaines de millions d’annees.

‘Dinosaurs lived hundreds of millions of years ago.’

There were 105 participants, all native speakers of French. At the time when the

experiment was carried out, they were 1st year Bachelor students at the Faculty of

Humanities at the University of Neuchatel. Their participation in the experiment

took place during a Linguistics class. It was the first time they participated in this

type of experiment. The training done on 6 excerpts containing instances of the

three target verbal tenses was followed by an interactive discussion regarding the

judgments given for each excerpt. They did not receive any other training than the

one described above. After the training, each participant received on a paper new

excerpts containing instances of the three target verbal tenses, as explained below.

The material used consisted of 214 excerpts containing 65 occurrences of the PS,

72 occurrences of the PC and 77 occurrences of the IMP (20.5% of the total number

of excerpts containing a PS, a PC or an IMP in French as source and as target

language). They were randomly chosen from the French side of Grisot (2015)

parallel corpus. The excerpts were similar to those of examples (14)–(19).

Specifically, there were 121 excerpts originally written in French (23% of the total

number of excerpts containing a PS, a PC or an IMP in this corpus) and 92 excerpts

originally written in English and randomly selected from the French side of the

English-French corpus (17.5% of the total number of excerpts containing a PS, a PC

or an IMP in this corpus). Original and translated data were used in order to test

whether the participants’ judgement about subjectivity is influenced by the status of

the language. The 214 excerpts were distributed in 21 sets, 20 sets contained 10

excerpts and one set 14 excerpts. Each participant received only one set. Each set

was annotated by 5 participants. The evaluation of the results was performed by

40 C. Grisot

123

calculating pairwise agreement for each item and the Қ value for each pair of

annotators.

The results are the following. The clean data consisted of 203 excerpts. There

were 11 missing data points due to the fact that some participants did not judge all

the excerpts from the set they received. The mean Қ value for the inter-judge

agreement rate among the five annotators was 0.29.5 Pairwise agreement analysis

showed that 65 excerpts (32%) received an identical judgement by all the annotators

and 138 excerpts (68%) received an identical judgement by a majority of annotators

(half + 1 or half + 2). All the three verbal tenses analysed were judged as having

subjective and non-subjective usages, as shown in Table 2.

The same analysis was carried out on the data containing only occurrences of the

three target verbal tenses that received an identical judgement by all five annotators,

as shown in Table 3.

The results are similar in the two types of analysis: the IMP and the PS are

primarily used subjectively whereas the PC is primarily used non-subjectively.

Using a Chi square test, this association was shown not to be statistically significant

(χ2 = 4.87, df = 2, p = 0.0876). Hence, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected and I

conclude that none of these verbal tenses seems to be specialized for one or the

other type of interpretation. The pairs of examples (14) and (15), (16) and (17), (18)

and (19) illustrate the subjective and non-subjective usages of the IMP, PS, and

respectively, PC.

(14) Or mon petit bonhomme ne me semblait ni egare, ni mort de fatigue, ni mort

de faim, ni mort de soif, ni mort de peur.

‘And yet my little man seemed neither to be straying uncertainly among the

sands, nor to be fainting from fatigue or hunger or thirst or fear.’

(15) A Cuba, cela se traduisit des 1969 par une lettre pastorale dans laquelle

l’episcopat prenait ses distances avec l’exil.

‘In Cuba, these events were reflected as early as 1969 in a pastoral letter in

which the bishops distanced themselves from the extreme position of the

Cubans in exile.’

(16) Sans resultat. Les catholiques, flairant le piege, se rallierent autour de leur

Souverain pontife, et quand on les contraignit a choisir entre leur foi et leurfidelite a l’Etat, pencherent souvent en faveur de la premiere.

‘Catholics scented another agenda, rallied round their Pontiff, and when

forced to choose between faith and loyalty to the state, often chose the

former.’

(17) Une indemnite d’encouragement fut votee, seance tenante, en faveur du

docteur Fergusson, et s’éleva au chiffre de deux mille cinq cents livres.

‘So a subscription to encourage Dr. Ferguson was voted there and then, and

it at once attained the handsome amount of two thousand five hundred

pounds.’

5 0.37 for the pair A1–A2, 0.31 for the pair A1–A3, 0.34 for the pair A1–A4, 0.45 for the pair A1–A5,

0.26 for the pair A2–A3, 0.144 for the pair A2–A4, 0.27 for the pair A2–A5, 0.24 for the pair A3–A4,

0.27 for the pair A3–A5, 0.28 for the pair A4–A5. These values reflect inter-subject analyses because each

annotator saw only one set and each set was judged by five annotators.


123

(18) C’est la raison pour laquelle nous avons vraiment prepare, en commission,

cette deuxieme lecture en un temps record, et nous l’avons présentée en

session pleniere afin d’avoir le temps de mener les negociations sur une base

serieuse avant la fin de cette annee.

‘This means that only a conciliation procedure can resolve the problem, so,

in the committee, we prepared the second reading and presented it to plenary

in what really was record time, so that we would have enough time to

conduct the negotiations, on a serious basis, before the year is over.’

(19) Ce n’est pas a la Grande mosquee de Paris, mais dans la cathedrale Notre-

Dame qu’un groupe d’activistes gays a orchestré une “ceremonie de

mariage” homosexuel il y a six ans, au cours de laquelle le pape Benoıt XVI

a ete insulte.

‘It was not in the Great Mosque of Paris, but in Notre Dame Cathedral that a

group of gay activists staged a homosexual “wedding ceremony” six years

ago, during which words offensive to Pope Benedict XVI could be heard.’

The results of the analysis of subjective and non-subjective usages of French verbal

tenses analysed with respect to the stylistic register are given in Table 4. Using a Chi

Square test, this distribution is shown to be statistically significant (χ2 = 13.13,

df = 2, p\ 0.05). The analysis of standardized residuals indicates that the source of

this significance is the journalistic register, where the number of observed subjective

sentences is smaller than the expected one whereas the number of non-subjective

sentences is larger than the expected one.

The analysis per type of language (French as original language vs. translated

language) carried out on data consisting of the 65 perfect agreements (35 excerpts

for the source language and 30 excerpts for the target language) confirms the

preferences found for each verbal tense analysed. The preferences are more marked

for French as original language, as shown in Table 5. However, the difference

Table 2 Results in data

containing 203 agreementsNon- subjective Subjective Total

Abs. freq. (%) Abs. freq. (%) Abs. freq.

IMP 32 44 41 56 73

PC 41 60 27 40 68

PS 31 50 31 50 62

Table 3 Results in data

containing 65 perfect

agreements

Non- subjective Subjective Total

Abs. freq. (%) Abs. freq. (%) Abs. freq.

IM 8 36 14 64 22

PC 18 67 9 33 27

PS 7 44 9 56 16

42 C. Grisot

123

between French as original and as translated language was shown not to be

statistically significant (χ2 = 0.06, df = 1, p = 0.8065).

These results are similar to the results of a pilot experiment, in which two

annotators judged 80 new excerpts (27 PS, 26 PC and 27 IMP) randomly chosen

from the French side of Grisot’s (2015) parallel corpus. The pilot experiment was

carried following the methodology and the procedure described in “Methodology

and procedure” section. The inter-judge agreement rate corresponded to a Қ value of

0.31. Each verbal tense was judged as having both subjective and non-subjective

usages. A qualitative analysis was performed on the explanations given by the two

judges for each label chosen during the debriefing session. The judges explained

that in 81% of the cases, their judgement was based on linguistic cues, such as

grammatical aspect. Specifically, the imperfective aspect was correlated to

subjective usages (and therefore, by exclusion, the perfective aspect was correlated

to non-subjective usages). Other cues, such as reflexive pronouns, mental state verbs

(e.g. believe), verbs indicating direct perception (e.g. see), and inferred perception

were signalled in 19% of the cases. In other words, it might be possible that the

annotators used their intuitive knowledge that the IMP is imperfective and that the

PS and the PC are perfective, to make their judgement regarding subjectivity.

Experiment 3

The purpose of Experiment 3 was to test the link between subjectivity and the

speaker’s viewpoint when it is grammatically expressed, as it is in Serbian. The data

used in this experiment was randomly chosen from Grisot’s (2015) sub-corpus of SP

occurrences, and then translated into Serbian by a Serbian native speaker.

According to Smith’s (2003) classification of sources of subjectivity, grammatical

aspect is included in her fourth category: perception and perspectival cues. More



usages of French verbal tenses

by type of sub-corpus


Abs. freq. (%) Abs. freq. (%)

Europarl 34 53 30 47 64



Total 99 104 99

Table 5 Results for French as source and as target language, in data containing 65 perfect agreements

IMP PC PS

Source (%) Target (%) Source (%) Target (%) Source (%) Target (%)

Non-subjective 43 25 58 73 56 29

Subjective 57 75 42 27 44 71


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


Abs. Freq. (%) Abs. Freq. (%)

Imperfective 36 90 4 10 40

Perfective 10 43 13 57 23

Total 46 17 63


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,



usages of Serbian grammatical

aspect by type of sub-corpus


Abs. freq. (%) Abs. freq. (%)

Europarl 15 60 10 71 25



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.


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.


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


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

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