The Semantic Categories of cutting and breaking events: A crosslinguistic perspective

Asifa Majid, Melissa Bowerman, Miriam Van Staden and James S. Boster

"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 constructed semantic space."

2 views of "the categories associated with everyday words": they "are largley universal. This is because, by hypothesis, they originate in nonlinguistic cognition. . . acquiring basic vocabulary is a process of mapping words to concepts that have already been established on a nonlinguistic basis. The other view: "lexical categories do not reflect shared nonlinguistic cognition directly, but are to some extent linguistic conventions that are free to vary . . ."learning words, even for seemingly universal human experiences and activities, often involves working out language-specific principles of categorization."

"actions of C&B have been central to hominid cognition and culture for more than two million years . . ., which might plead for a degree of universality in the conceptualization of such events."

"On the other hand, preliminary crosslinguistic work ... shows that C&B verbs have intriguingly different extension patterns in different languages."

"...the necessary set of categories may not be obvious to first langauge learners purely on the basis of nonlinguistic experience, but must be learned through exposure to the input language. . . .Children make many errors in their spontaneous speech in referring to events of C&B..."

"There are, then, arguments both for and against the hypothesis that core categories of C&B events are cognitively obvious and universally shared."

"Our central question is how similar the semantic categories of C&B events are across languages."

"The extremes of Dimension 1 are distinguished in all the languages; that is, the events represented to the far left are systematically described with different verbs than those represented to the afr right. Clips at intermediate positions along the dimensiona re reated in different ways by different languages."

"chopping off branch with axe" and "breaking stick with karate chop" are distinguished in English "The common denominator of this categorixzation is the use of a blade (-like) instrument to effect the seperation, regardless of whether it is applied with precise placement or ballistic swing." But in "German: chopping events were routinely classed with events positioned toward the right end of the dimension . . . The common denomiator defining this category is the use of a sharp blow, whether by a bladed implement or a blunt one."

In Sranan, and English-based Carribbean Creole, "Sranan cares more about the nature of teh seperation than about the instrument."

"Events can be distinguished on the basis of how predicatable the location of seperation is in an object (Dimension 1), tearing events are very often honored with a verb of their own (Diemsnion 2), and snapping events are likely to be distinguished from smashing events (DImension 3.
Of course, non eof the langauges categorized C&B events in exactly the same way."