The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective
-
Asifa Majid
,
Melissa Bowerman
Abstract
This special issue of Cognitive Linguistics explores the linguistic encoding of events of cutting and breaking. In this article we first introduce the project on which it is based by motivating the selection of this conceptual domain, presenting the methods of data collection used by all the investigators, and characterizing the language sample. We then present a new approach to examining crosslinguistic similarities and differences in semantic categorization. Applying statistical modeling to the descriptions of cutting and breaking events elicited from speakers of all the languages, we show that although there is crosslinguistic variation in the number of distinctions made and in the placement of category boundaries, these differences take place within a strongly constrained semantic space: across languages, there is a surprising degree of consensus on the partitioning of events in this domain. In closing, we compare our statistical approach with more conventional semantic analyses, and show how an extensional semantic typological approach like the one illustrated here can help illuminate the intensional distinctions made by languages.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective
- Morpholexical Transparency and the argument structure of verbs of cutting and breaking
- How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages
- Cutting, breaking, and tearing verbs in Hindi and Tamil
- Cut and break verbs in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island
- ‘Chop, shred, snap apart’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Lowland Chontal
- Cut and break verbs in Sranan
- Cut and break verbs in Ewe and the causative alternation construction
- ‘Smash it again, Sam’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Jalonke
- Describing cutting and breaking events in Kuuk Thaayorre
- ‘He cut-break the rope’: Encoding and categorizing cutting and breaking events in Mandarin
- Lao separation verbs and the logic of linguistic event categorization
- ‘Please open the fish’: Verbs of separation in Tidore, a Papuan language of Eastern Indonesia
- Cutting and breaking verbs in Otomi: An example of lexical specification
- ‘She had just cut/broken off her head’: Cutting and breaking verbs in Tzeltal
- Semantic categories of cutting and breaking: Some final thoughts
Articles in the same Issue
- The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective
- Morpholexical Transparency and the argument structure of verbs of cutting and breaking
- How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages
- Cutting, breaking, and tearing verbs in Hindi and Tamil
- Cut and break verbs in Yélî Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island
- ‘Chop, shred, snap apart’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Lowland Chontal
- Cut and break verbs in Sranan
- Cut and break verbs in Ewe and the causative alternation construction
- ‘Smash it again, Sam’: Verbs of cutting and breaking in Jalonke
- Describing cutting and breaking events in Kuuk Thaayorre
- ‘He cut-break the rope’: Encoding and categorizing cutting and breaking events in Mandarin
- Lao separation verbs and the logic of linguistic event categorization
- ‘Please open the fish’: Verbs of separation in Tidore, a Papuan language of Eastern Indonesia
- Cutting and breaking verbs in Otomi: An example of lexical specification
- ‘She had just cut/broken off her head’: Cutting and breaking verbs in Tzeltal
- Semantic categories of cutting and breaking: Some final thoughts
