Topic — lexicon (23 entries)
Cut and Break Clips
How do different languages treat a particular semantic domain? It has already been established that languages have widely varied words for talking about “cutting” and “breaking” things: for example, English… More →
Body Colouring Task
This task investigates the extensional meaning of body part terms, in particular the terms for the upper and lower limbs. Two questions are addressed, namely (i) are the boundaries of… More →
Landscape Terms and Place Names Elicitation Guide
Landscape terms reflect the relationship between geographic reality and human cognition. Are ‘mountains’, ‘rivers, ‘lakes’ and the like universally recognised in languages as naturally salient objects to be named? The… More →
Lexical Comparison Between Papuan Languages: Inland Bird and Tree Species
The Pioneers project seeks to uncover relationships between the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia. One basic way to uncover linguistic relationships, either contact or genetic, is through lexical comparison. We… More →
Put Project: The Cross-Linguistic Encoding of Placement Events
How similar are the event concepts encoded by different languages? So far, few event domains have been investigated in any detail. The PUT project extends the systematic cross-linguistic exploration of… More →
Emotion Categories in Language and Thought
Emotion has been a core domain for investigating the relative roles of biology and culture in human cognition. The goal is to investigate cross-cultural emotional categories in language and thought.… More →
Language of Perception: The View From Language and Culture
This entry provides an overview of some linguistic phenomena pertinent to the “language of perception”, and is a necessary companion to the elicitation tasks later in the field manual. The… More →
Time and Space Questionnaire
This entry contains: 1. An invitation to think about to what extent the grammar of space and time share lexical and morphosyntactic resources − the suggestions here are only prompts,… More →
Metalanguage for Speech Acts
People of all cultures have some degree of concern with categorizing types of communicative social action. All languages have words with meanings like speak, say, talk, complain, curse, promise, accuse,… More →
Semplates: A Guide to Identification and Elicitation
Semplates are a new descriptive and theoretical concept in lexical semantics, borne out of recent L&C work in several domains. A semplate can be defined as a configuration consisting of… More →