Towards a semantic typology of event segmentation

Semantic typology is the study of semantic categorization. In the simplest case, semantic typology investigates how an identical perceptual stimulus is categorized across languages. The problem examined in this article is that of event segmentation. To the extent that events are perceivable, this may be understood as the representation of dynamic stimuli in chunks of linguistic code with categorical properties. For illustration, consider an example from a classic study on event cognition (Jenkins, Wald and Pittenger 1986): a woman prepares a cup of tea. She unwraps a tea bag, puts it into the cup, gets a kettle of water from the kitchen, pours the water into the cup, etc. This action sequence can be diagrammed schematically as in fig. 3.1.

It is conceivable that at some level of “raw” perception – before the onset of any kind of categorization – the action sequence is represented as a continuous flux. But it is hard to imagine how higher cognitive operations of recognition and inference could operate without segmenting the stream of perceived activity into units that are treated as instances of conceptual categories. Let us call the intentional correlates of such categories ‘events.’ Regardless of whether or not one assumes internal representations of the action sequence to operate on event concepts, linguistic representations of it do require segmentation into units that can be labeled as instances of unwrapping a tea bag, pouring water into a cup, and so on.