Granularity in the Verbalization of Events and Objects: A cross-linguistic study

The study investigates the granularity of languages in encoding events and objects, comparing German, English, Greek, and Turkish. It finds significant granularity effects between languages and language types, with German and English exhibiting finer-grained encoding than Greek and Turkish. The results have implications for linguistic typology, lexical and semantic typology, contrastive linguistics, event representation, psycholinguistics, and cognitive semantics.

Format: Hardback
Length: 531 pages
Publication date: 15 August 2023
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co

The study investigates the encoding of events and objects in languages at different levels of granularity, focusing on four languages: German, English, Greek, and Turkish. It examines whether languages encode events and objects at a coarse-grained level (e.g., put, glass) or a fine-grained level (e.g., lay, wine glass) systematically. The level of detail is termed granularity, which is viewed as a cline from fine-grained semantic specificity to coarse-grained semantic generality. The study draws on elicited data from a naming task and verbalizes events based on event and object descriptions in selected semantic domains. The results reveal significant granularity effects between languages and language types (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed). The study is relevant for scholars interested in linguistic typology, lexical and semantic typology, contrastive linguistics, event representation, psycholinguistics, and cognitive semantics. It was awarded the prestigious André Martinet Award 2024 from the Societas Linguistica Europaea!

ISBN-13: 9789027213822