TheObject : Substance :: Event : ProcessAnalogy

Abstract

Beginning at least with Bach (1986), semanticists have suggested that objects are formally parallel to events in the way substances are formally parallel to processes. This chapter investigates whether these parallels can be understood to reflect a shared representational format in cognition, which underlies aspects of the intuitive metaphysics of these categories. The authors of this chapter hypothesized that a way of counting (atomicity) is necessary for object and event representations, unlike for substance or process representations. Atomicity is strongly implied by plural but not mass language. The chapter investigates the language–perception interface across these domains using minimally different images and animations, designed either to encourage atomicity (‘natural’ breaks) or to discourage it (‘unnatural’ breaks). The experiments test preference for naming such stimuli with mass or count syntax. The results support Bach’s analogy in perception and highlight the formal role of atomicity in object and event representation.

Interpreting Degree Semantics

“…Semanticists theorize about all kinds of things that expressions may be "about"-in addition to objects, substances, and times, we posit events, processes, states, negative events, possible worlds, impossible worlds, and so on. Much of this talk would be news to psychologists, though there are already good case studies illustrating the payoffs for cognitive psychology of testing semantic posits as hypotheses about representation (for a very recent example, see Wellwood et al, 2018b). The approach I advocate thus invites semanticists to explicitly characterize their theory in such a way that it may be tested by these neighboring fields, and it invites psychologists to read our theories this way even when not so-intended.…”

“…Our early conceptual repertoire plays an important role in our cognitive economy throughout our lives and is likely responsible for endowing us with a naive concept of water that meets the divisiveness condition (cf. Prasada et al, 2002;Wellwood et al, 2018b). However, this repertoire does not restrict us from acquiring new conceptse.g., one that is identical in extension with that of H 2 0-even if the two may ultimately be in conflict, metaphysically.…”

“…Thus, our semantic intuitions might track properties of conception that are below what is available to introspection, while our metaphysical intuitions reflect a composite of (and sometimes tension between) our naive concepts and our more reflective ones. 32 See Wellwood et al (2016) and Wellwood et al (2018b) for the use of a similarityjudgment task to get at the salience of numerical differences and Spelke (2003) for important results gleaned from verbal shadowing tasks. 33 See, in this connection, Pietroski (2010) and Vicente (2012) for recent discussion, novel approaches, and citations to relevant literature.…”

WHAT more IS

“…Recently, Wellwood et al. (,b) investigated the distinction between events and processes directly, leveraging the semantic analogy between the referential properties of NPs and VPs to advance this discussion (see Taylor , Bach ). At issue was whether there was a common psychological construct corresponding to the presence of the predicate Atom in smantic representations like (55) and (56).…”

If you want a quick kiss, make it count: How choice of syntactic construction affects event construal

“…These light verb constructions appear either with count syntax, such as to give a kiss and to give a talk , or mass syntax, such as to give advice . Thus, light verb constructions offer us an opportunity to study the interaction of verb type and mass versus count syntax with an existing alternation, as opposed to unusual constructions such as to do climbs (Barner et al, 2008), or using novel lexical items (Wellwood, Hespos, & Rips, 2016): Light verb constructions, like to give a kiss , and their full verb counterparts, like to kiss , are in a relationship of syntactic alternation with minimal difference in meaning (Allerton, 2002; Glatz, 2006). In our study of punctive and durative events, we use light verb constructions with give , which is itself telic (Newman, 1996).…”