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Conference Paper

Specificity at the basic level in event taxonomies: The case of Maniq verbs of ingestion

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Wnuk,  Ewelina
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society, Nijmegen, NL;
Radboud University;

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https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2016/papers/0463/index.html
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Wnuk_Cogsci2016.pdf
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Citation

Wnuk, E. (2016). Specificity at the basic level in event taxonomies: The case of Maniq verbs of ingestion. In A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, & J. Trueswell (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2016) (pp. 2687-2692). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002B-1A3F-F
Abstract
Previous research on basic-level object categories shows there is cross-cultural variation in basic-level concepts, arguing against the idea that the basic level reflects an objective reality. In this paper, I extend the investigation to the domain of events. More specifically, I present a case study of verbs of ingestion in Maniq illustrating a highly specific categorization of ingestion events at the basic level. A detailed analysis of these verbs reveals they tap into culturally salient notions. Yet, cultural salience alone cannot explain specificity of basic-level verbs, since ingestion is a domain of universal human experience. Further analysis reveals, however, that another key factor is the language itself. Maniq’s preference for encoding specific meaning in basic-level verbs is not a peculiarity of one domain, but a recurrent characteristic of its verb lexicon, pointing to the significant role of the language system in the structure of event concepts