The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective
The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective
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DOI：
10.1515/cog.2007.005
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发表时间：
2007-01-01
影响因子：
1.7
通讯作者：
Boster, James S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Majid, Asifa;Bowerman, Melissa;Boster, James S.
本期《认知语言学》特刊探讨了切割和断裂事件的语言编码。在本文中，我们首先通过激励这个概念领域的选择来介绍它所基于的项目，展示所有研究者使用的数据收集方法，并描述语言样本。然后，我们提出了一种新的方法来研究语义分类的跨语言异同。将统计建模应用于从所有语言的讲者那里得到的切割和断裂事件的描述，我们表明，尽管在区分的数量和类别边界的位置上存在跨语言差异，但这些差异发生在一个强烈约束的语义空间内：跨语言，在该领域的事件划分上存在令人惊讶的共识程度。最后，我们将我们的统计方法与更传统的语义分析方法进行了比较，并展示了像这里所示的外延语义类型学方法如何有助于阐明语言之间的内涵区别。
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.