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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Thursday, April 15, 12noon in 460-126:
Event Categorization in Adult and Child
Language: The case of 'cutting' and 'breaking'
Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Nijmegen)
To be able to talk about their experiences, speakers have to parse the
ongoing perceptual flow into units and categorize these units as instances
of recurrent event types such as `running' or `breaking something'. Do the
verbs of different languages group and distinguish events in largely the
same way, perhaps due to biases in human nonlinguistic event cognition or
to clustering of event features in the real world? Or do languages
partition events in an infinite number of crosscutting ways? How do
children arrive at the event categories their language requires? These
questions can be explored by asking speakers of a range of genetically and
areally diverse languages to describe standardized sets of events, and
then comparing their responses with the help of multivariate statistics in
search of universal, language-specific, and age-related patterns in the
semantic structuring of the domain. I illustrate this approach with
results from two ongoing Max Planck group projects on the categorization
of events that have played an important role in lexical semantic
theorizing -- 'cutting' and 'breaking', and consider implications of
fine-grained language variability for the semantic representation of
predicate meaning.
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
Back to the workshop homepage.
This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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