Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing

To say that verbs are the key elements of syntactic and semantic (or conceptual) representations of events and states is a rather uncontroversial statement in linguistics. This state of certainty about the centrality of verbs in linguistics, however, is not necessarily shared by other disciplines within cognitive science. The psychological literature on concepts, for instance, has virtually ignored verb representations, focusing on concepts that are lexicalized by nouns. This is surprising because verbs are linguistic encodings of states, events, and other happenings , which play an important role in how concepts are mentally represented and how they are expressed in natural language. This volume aims to explore verb meaning representation, structure, and acquisition from a cognitive science viewpoint, with contributions by linguists, philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists. While the authors of this book believe that verbs play a prominent role in conceptualization and in sentence representation and processing, they also believe that verb structure and meaning receive less attention in other cognitive science areas in large part due to a lack of crosstalk between disciplines and even within different approaches to verb representation. Therefore, another aim of the book Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing is to contribute to narrowing the gap between disciplines as well as within linguistics as a discipline.