Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German

Abstract

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie) and Patient (i.e., the bagel). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as the knife are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled “Instrument”) and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto‐instrument is a tool: a physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individual or object. To test this, we asked speakers of English, Dutch, and German to complete an event description task and a sentence acceptability judgment task in which events were viewed with more or less prototypical instruments. We found broad similarities in how English, Dutch, and German partition the semantic space of instrumental events, suggesting there is a shared concept of the Instrument category. However, there was no evidence to support the specific hypothesis that tools are the core of the Instrument category—instead, our results suggest the most prototypical Instrument is the direct extension of an intentional agent. This paper supports theoretical frameworks where thematic roles are analyzed in terms of prototypes and suggests new avenues of research on how instrumental category structure differs across linguistic and conceptual domains.

Universal Constraints on Linguistic Event Categories: A Cross-Cultural Study of Child Homesign

“…At a more fine-grained level, however, it is unclear whether the categories that are important for tool language are also important for tool concepts. For example, in English, Dutch, and German, tools and nontool body parts can belong to the same linguistic category because they can be marked morphologically in the same way (e.g., "she cut the bread with a knife," "she pressed the button with her foot"; Rissman et al, 2022). This equivalence is not necessarily conceptually universal given the strong distinction between artifacts and natural kinds.…”

The Power of the Lexicon: Eliciting Superordinate Categories With and Without Labels

“…Simpson's D takes into account the distribution of response types within a category as well as the overall size of the category (see Majid et al, 2018;Rissman, van Putten, & Majid, 2022; Zettersten & Lupyan, 2020 on computation of this index). D-values range from 0 to 1, with 0 corresponding to complete heterogeneity (all responses are different) and 1 to complete homogeneity (all responses are the same).…”