Volume — 2001 (15 entries)

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 →

How do languages express ideas of movement, and how do they package different components of moving, such as manner and path? This task supports detailed investigation of motion descriptions. The… More →

What kinds of resources do languages have for describing location and position? For some languages, verbs have an important role to play in describing different kinds of situations (e.g., whether… More →

The term “event” is a controversial concept, and the “same” activity or situation can be linguistically encoded in many different ways. The aim of this task is to explore features… More →

Demonstratives (e.g., words such as this and that in English) pivot on relationships between the item being talked about, and features of the speech act situation (e.g., where the speaker… More →

Place-names (toponyms) are at the intersection of spatial language, culture, and cognition. This questionnaire prepares the researcher to answer three overarching questions: how to formally identify place-names in the research… More →

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 →

“Recognitional” words and constructions enshrine our systematic reliance on shared knowledge in dedicated morphological forms and usage patterns. For example, English has a large range of terms for use when… More →

Judgments we make about how similar or different events are to each other can reveal the features we find useful in classifying the world. This task is designed to investigate… More →

Gesture is an integral part of face-to-face communication, and provides a rich area for cross-cultural comparison. “Locally-anchored spatial gestures” are gestures that are roughly oriented to the actual geographical direction… More →