The Categories across language and cognition project investigates how different languages encode common human experiences, from simple perceptual stimuli to concrete objects, more complex dynamic events, right through to navigating spatial expanses. Examining a range of semantic domains enables us to address core theoretical questions and cross-cutting themes (e.g. ineffability, semplates) at the heart of the language - cognition interface.

Language and perception

How do different speakers of different languages talk about simple perceptual and emotional experiences? Do linguistic categories shape our perceptual experiences?

• Language of perception
• Ideophones and sound-symbolism
• Development of perceptual categories
• Synaesthesia across cultures
• Emotions
• Dimensions of Sound in Language and Mind

Evolution of semantic systems

A joint research initiative between the Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture group and Categories across Language and Cognition project. more>

Ethnobiology

How do people classify and reason about the organic world? more >

The body

The human body has a special status: it is both an ordinary object in visual and tactile space, and one to which we have privileged internal access. How do language, vision and touch interact to create a sense of bodily awareness?

• Parts of the body in languages
• Body parts in perception

Event representation

How do languages code events and their participants? And how do children acquire these structures?

• Motion
• Cut and break
• Put and take
• Reciprocals
• Event Segmentation

Space

How do people talk about and understand space, both at a large scale for example in navigation and at a small scale for example when locating objects? And how does space structure our understanding of other domains, such as time?

• Frames of reference
• Language and landscape
• Demonstratives
• Adpositions
• Time in space

Categories in discourse

What is the relevance of genres or text categories for researching the role of language, culture and cognition? What force have narrative and discourse exerted on the evolution and development of grammatical categories? How are social domains like kinship, and the transmission of cultural knowledge constructed in and by narrative? more >

• Genres
• Referential formulation