The Perspective from Semantic Typology

This chapter provides a synopsis of the cross-linguistic approach to studying concepts, with the aim of giving readers enough background to understand and appreciate the more detailed typological data covered in Part II. The first section focuses on the fact that most people, including cognitive neuroscientists, are highly susceptible to mistakenly thinking that the concepts conveyed by the words in their language represent the world in an objective manner that is self-evident and inevitable. The next two sections then introduce some basic aspects of semantic typology by discussing a variety of cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the encoding of concepts, first with regard to lexical semantics, and then with regard to grammatical semantics.