Objects

Abstract

It is tempting to suppose that all languages represent objects in comparable ways. Typological research has shown, however, that while there are many cross-linguistic similarities in this semantic realm, there are also numerous differences. This chapter describes some of these findings and explores their implications for cognitive neuroscience. The first section discusses plant, animal, and artifact concepts jointly, but in a manner that still respects their different treatments by typologists and neuroscientists. Then the subsequent section focuses on a fourth domain, namely body parts. Next, the chapter considers some of the ways in which objects are represented by the following kinds of closed-class items and constructions: grammatical-semantic splits involving possession, and nominal classification systems. Although both of these forms of object representation have been intensively investigated in typology, they have been almost completely neglected in neuroscience; hence, they are especially relevant to the latter field of study.