Asifa Majid

My research investigates the nature of categories and concepts in language, in non-linguistic perception and cognition, and the relationship between them. I adopt a large-scale cross-cultural approach in order to establish which aspects of categorisation are fundamentally shared, and which language-specific. My work is interdisciplinary, combining standardised psychological methodology, in-depth linguistic studies and ethnographically-informed description. This coordinated approach has been used in my study of the domains of space, event representation and more recently the language of perception. I coordinate the Categories across language and cognition project, a team of 20-odd linguists, anthropologists and psychologists who collaborate on this effort.