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Semantics may reflect "core" event structure : Language as a window into event psychology| old_uid | 12140 |
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| title | Semantics may reflect "core" event structure : Language as a window into event psychology |
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| start_date | 2013/02/25 |
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| schedule | 14h30-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 159 |
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| summary | Although semanticists and psychologists have long standing interests in the nature of
event representation, interactions between these communities have unfortunately remained limited.
Part of the reason is methodological. Psychologists have traditionally studied
non-
linguistically
represented events and their influence on mental processes like attention, memory and
internal time keeping. Semanticists on the other hand have (obviously) been interested in event
representation in
linguistic
contexts. Despite these diverging methodologies, I argue that lessons
from semantics may have important implications for psychological theories of event representation.
In particular, psychology currently lacks a clear description of the computational nature of event
representations (e.g. do they have internal structure or are they atomistic?), and this is exactly the
type of question that work from linguistics could shed light on. In recommending a theoretical
perspective capable of importing findings from one field into the other, I suggest that language may
have co-opted core knowledge of events (that is operative in beings lacking language like infants
and primates) as a way of structuring the syntax/semantics interface. Thus by examining universal
phenomena typically studied by linguists like thematic role assignment and telicity, psychologists
can glean useful hypotheses about “core” knowledge and the structure of non-linguistically
represented events. I review some related psychological studies suggesting that this perspective has
already proven useful, but will also propose new lines of concrete empirical work that should be of
interest to both linguists and psychologists. |
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| responsibles | Copley |
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