Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 On representing events – an introduction
- 2 Event representation in serial verb constructions
- 3 The macro-event property
- 4 Event representation, time event relations, and clause structure
- 5 Event representations in signed languages
- 6 Linguistic and non-linguistic categorization of complex motion events
- 7 Putting things in places
- 8 Language-specific encoding of placement events in gestures
- 9 Visual encoding of coherent and non-coherent scenes
- 10 Talking about events
- 11 Absent causes, present effects
- References
- Index
6 - Linguistic and non-linguistic categorization of complex motion events
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 On representing events – an introduction
- 2 Event representation in serial verb constructions
- 3 The macro-event property
- 4 Event representation, time event relations, and clause structure
- 5 Event representations in signed languages
- 6 Linguistic and non-linguistic categorization of complex motion events
- 7 Putting things in places
- 8 Language-specific encoding of placement events in gestures
- 9 Visual encoding of coherent and non-coherent scenes
- 10 Talking about events
- 11 Absent causes, present effects
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Motion events play a central role in people's representation of the world. Not only is our perception of motion events crucial for safely navigating through the world and key to our survival; our conceptual understanding of motion events is necessary for interpreting other people's behavior, and for accurately communicating important aspects of an event to others. Despite the importance of event cognition in people's everyday functioning, most research on motion and event processing to date has been restricted to low-level phenomena associated with simple perception of motion, while studies investigating higher-level conceptual phenomena are few and far between. In recent years, however, there has been a growing body of interdisciplinary research on people's understanding of events (as we hope this volume has made apparent). Growing evidence indicates that we possess a very powerful system for processing events, especially for events involving acts of human motion (Baldwin 2005). Our conception of events appears crucial to our understanding of social behavior in two ways: the first, that we utilize our event processing system to understand people's intentions and goals, and the second, that we communicate the details of events to others using language.
Given the importance of motion events in social functioning, it is no wonder that language systems around the world provide speakers with a rich set of lexical items with which to describe many of the details present in the complex stream of motion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Event Representation in Language and Cognition , pp. 108 - 133Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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