Introduction

One of the central questions in cognitive linguistics concerns human cognition and the way dynamic situations are structured for expression. When language is used to convey information on experience, it is far from being a mirror of what was actually perceived. Representations are based on information stored in memory and retrieved when construing a reportable event in the language used. Taking the linguistic output as a point of reference, the process is selective, perspective-driven and interpretative. Crosslinguistic studies of event representation show that the perspectives chosen can differ, depending on the expressive means available to the speaker, and the term ‘event representation’ is used in the following to relate to event construal at this level. Many languages require speakers to direct attention to temporal contours of events, for example, as in aspect-marking languages such as Modern Standard Arabic, where events are viewed and encoded as to whether they are completed, ongoing, or relate to a specific phase (inceptive, terminative, etc.). When talking about events, speakers may also have to accommodate relational systems that include reference to the time of speech, since formal means of this kind allow us to say whether an event occurred in the near or distant past, for example, or just now. An assertion such as the lights went out when the dog barked is grounded in context, in temporal terms, since the time for which the assertion holds has been specified as preceding the time of utterance.

Introduction

What information do speakers attend to as they prepare to speak about the world? This question lies at the heart of concerns about how language might influence the ways in which humans deal with the world. As we plan to talk about events around us, we must select which information is relevant for expression and how to encode it in speech. This activity is alternatively known in the literature as ‘macro-planning,’ ‘linguistic conceptualization,’ ‘event construal,’ and ‘perspective taking’ (e.g., Levelt 1989; von Stutterheim and Klein 2002; von Stutterheim, Nüse, and Murcia-Serra 2002). Various suggestions have been made regarding what constrains such information selection. One approach focuses on the effects of the linguistic categories themselves. It suggests that speakers' choices of information are guided or “filtered” through the linguistic categories afforded by their language, specifically by the categories they habitually use to express events (e.g., Berman and Slobin 1994a; Carroll and von Stutterheim 2003, and in this volume; Slobin 1991, 1996a; von Stutterheim and Nüse 2003; von Stutterheim, Nüse, and Murcia-Serra 2002). This idea is known as the thinking for speaking hypothesis (e.g., Slobin 1991, 1996a). Language-specific rhetorical styles, views or perspectives arise through the habitual use of linguistic categories that select for certain types of information to be expressed (Slobin 2004; Talmy 2008). This view of the effect of linguistic categories on speaking differs in scope from the so-called linguistic relativity or neo-Whorfian hypothesis.

Introduction

People, in common with other creatures, need to identify recurrences in the world in order to thrive. Recurrences, whether in space or time, provide the stability and predictability that enable both understanding of the past and effective action in the future. Recurrences are often collected into categories and, in humans, named. One crucial category, and set of categories, is events, the stuff that fills our lives: preparing a meal, cleaning the house, going to the movies. Event categories are an especially rich and complex set of categories as they can extend over both time and space and can involve interactions and interrelations among multiple people, places, and things. Despite their complexity, they can be named by simple terms, a war or an election or a concert and described in a few words, folding the clothes, rinsing the dishes, or tuning the violin. People have an advantage over their non-verbal relatives in that language can facilitate learning categories and serve as a surrogate for them in reasoning. What are the effects of naming or describing over and above identifying categories? And what do the descriptions reveal about the categories? Here, we examine some of the consequences and characteristics of language for familiar categories, events, and the bodies that perform them.

Introduction

Causal relationships range from the physical to the abstract: from friction causing heat to stress causing forgetfulness. This broad spectrum of relationships motivates the question of what all causal relationships have in common. One approach has been to specify the conditions for causation in terms of the occurrence or non-occurrence of events or states, with no regard to processes that produce these events or states. Because these theories specify causation in terms of the effects of causation, they will be referred to as outcome theories. Outcome theories typically describe the conditions for causation in terms of probabilities, counterfactuals, first-order logic or mental models. An alternative approach specifies the conditions for causation in terms of the processes that bring about outcomes; such accounts will be referred to as process theories. Process theories typically specify the conditions for causation in terms of the transmission of energy and force or their analogs in the social and psychological domains, for example, intentions and social pressure.

The two kinds of theories sometimes address different questions about causation, making them, in some sense, complementary. However, they contrast sharply on the question of what counts as a causal event, in particular, the phenomenon of causation by omission. Causation by omission occurs when the absence of an influence brings about an effect. We say, for example, Not watering the plant caused it to wilt or Lack of clean air causes dizziness.

Introduction

Perceiving and talking about events taking place in the world around us is an essential part of our everyday life and crucial for social interaction with other human beings. Visual perception and language production are both involved in this complex cognitive behavior and have been investigated individually in numerous empirical studies. Extensive models have been provided for both domains (see Hoffmann 2000; Levelt 1989, for overviews). But an integrative approach to the interface between vision and speaking, to “seeing for speaking,” is still lacking. Psycholinguists have only recently begun to experimentally investigate how visual encoding and linguistic encoding interact when we describe events and their protagonists or participants (see Henderson and Ferreira, 2004b). These studies have answered some, but raised many more general and specific questions:

• How does visual encoding of events evolve; how detailed are representations of the visual world generated at various points during visual encoding?

• How is visual encoding linked to stages of linguistic encoding for speaking?

• Is the visual encoding of an event influenced by the linguistic task that subjects have to perform in experiments (e.g., describing scenes with full sentences vs. naming individual scene actors, and so on)?

• Is visual encoding influenced by the type of stimulus – in particular, are there differences between line drawings and naturalistic stimuli?

• Does the encoding of (parts of) coherent scenes differ from the encoding of (parts of) scenes in which objects, animals or people do not interact in ways that could be straightforwardly interpreted as meaningful, coherent action?

Introduction

Signed languages are the natural visual languages of the Deaf, and rely mainly on spatial and body-anchored devices (that is, the body, head, facial expression, eye gaze, and the physical space around the body) for linguistic expression. The affordances of the visual-spatial modality allow signers to give detailed information about the relative location and orientation, motion, and activity of the characters in an event, and to encode this information from certain visual perspectives. In spoken languages, devices such as spatial verbs, locatives, and spatial prepositions also help speakers to situate referents in a discourse context and describe relations among them from certain perspectives (e.g. Taylor and Tversky 1992; Berman and Slobin 1994; Gernsbacher 1997). However, due to modality differences, spatial details about an event can be conveyed in a richer way in signed compared to spoken languages. Furthermore, much spatial information, including visual perspective, is often encoded obligatorily in event predicates of location, motion and activity predicates in signed languages due to the modality.

The purpose of this chapter is to give an account of the way in which a signer's choice of visual perspective interacts with and determines the choice of different types of event predicates in narrative descriptions of complex spatial events. We also ask whether certain types of events (i.e. transitivity) are more or less likely to be expressed by certain perspectives and/or types of predicates.

Talking about events in Kalam and English

What can linguistic representations tell us about how people conceive of events? This chapter revisits an earlier debate on that question which focused on event representation in serial verb constructions (SVCs) in certain languages of New Guinea. Underlying the debate, between Tom Givón and me, was the general question of whether people who speak languages (or linguistic genres) with different semantic categories and structures live in partly different conceptual worlds or whether such linguistic differences are largely superficial and are not a reliable indicator of differences in worldview.

The debate was provoked, in part, by a paper comparing the way events are reported in English and in Kalam, a language spoken by about 20,000 people in the Bismarck and Schrader Ranges, on the northern fringes of the central highlands of Papua New Guinea (Pawley 1987). Givón felt that my conclusion that English and Kalam have markedly different conventions for reporting events, so that isomorphic or quasi-isomorphic translation of the reports was often impossible, could be read as adopting a position of “extreme culture-relativism” (1990: 22). A central issue was the definition of ‘(conceptual) event’ and the degree to which there is isomorphism between event boundaries defined by syntactic, semantic, and pause-placement or intonational criteria, respectively.

Kalam belongs to the large Trans New Guinea (TNG) family, containing some 400 languages, which dominates the central highlands of New Guinea.

This volume presents a collection of essays reporting on new research into the relationship between event representations in language and mind. In recent decades, linguists have increasingly invoked the notion of ‘events’ – under this and other labels – in modeling the meanings of natural language expressions. Indeed, numerous aspects of the structure of human languages are now commonly seen across theories and frameworks as geared towards the task of expressing event descriptions.

Like many of the constructs of semantic analysis and theory, the concept of ‘event’ has been influenced by the work of philosophers and natural scientists, usually with no more than a passing acknowledgment of the puzzles and controversies besetting its philosophical treatment (see Pianesi and Varzi 2000 for an overview). Philosophers have referenced the concept since antiquity, especially in treatments of causality (the subordinate notion of ‘actions’ has been used even longer in moral philosophy). However, events and their properties do not appear to have become topics of ontological research before the twentieth century, and their status must at present be considered far from settled. Even more glaring is the contrast between the rich and imposing architecture of event representations in language envisioned by many semanticists and the limited and scattered research on the status, nature, and role of event representations in the cognitive processing of perception and action by psychologists.

Towards a semantic typology of event segmentation

Semantic typology is the study of semantic categorization. In the simplest case, semantic typology investigates how an identical perceptual stimulus is categorized across languages. The problem examined in this article is that of event segmentation. To the extent that events are perceivable, this may be understood as the representation of dynamic stimuli in chunks of linguistic code with categorical properties. For illustration, consider an example from a classic study on event cognition (Jenkins, Wald and Pittenger 1986): a woman prepares a cup of tea. She unwraps a tea bag, puts it into the cup, gets a kettle of water from the kitchen, pours the water into the cup, etc. This action sequence can be diagrammed schematically as in fig. 3.1.

It is conceivable that at some level of “raw” perception – before the onset of any kind of categorization – the action sequence is represented as a continuous flux. But it is hard to imagine how higher cognitive operations of recognition and inference could operate without segmenting the stream of perceived activity into units that are treated as instances of conceptual categories. Let us call the intentional correlates of such categories ‘events.’ Regardless of whether or not one assumes internal representations of the action sequence to operate on event concepts, linguistic representations of it do require segmentation into units that can be labeled as instances of unwrapping a tea bag, pouring water into a cup, and so on.

Introduction

In this chapter, we explore how different languages describe events of putting things in places, and how children begin to talk about such events in their very early multi-word utterances. Our aim in focusing on the domain of “putting” events is to allow us to identify some important semantic and psycholinguistic factors that influence the course of acquisition. The overarching question is to determine the extent to which the development of linguistic event representations is influenced by the particular language the child is learning. Events of “putting” are frequently discussed in interactions between caregivers and children, providing us with a rich crosslinguistic database in a high-frequency semantic domain. By examining language-specific characteristics of early event representations, we can make inferences about the cognitive resources and abilities that children bring to the task of learning how to talk about events in their native language.

A major motivation for working crosslinguistically is to investigate the role of language typology in children's mapping of meanings onto forms – in this case, the expression of particular sorts of transitive motion events. In his well-known typology of how languages encode motion events, Talmy (1991, 2000b) distinguishes between ‘satellite-framed’ languages and ‘verb-framed’ languages on the basis of the element in the clause where information about path is characteristically encoded. Our analyses show that this typological distinction does play an important role in the course of language acquisition, but other features that crosscut this typology play a role as well.