10 - Talking about events

Summary

Introduction

People, in common with other creatures, need to identify recurrences in the world in order to thrive. Recurrences, whether in space or time, provide the stability and predictability that enable both understanding of the past and effective action in the future. Recurrences are often collected into categories and, in humans, named. One crucial category, and set of categories, is events, the stuff that fills our lives: preparing a meal, cleaning the house, going to the movies. Event categories are an especially rich and complex set of categories as they can extend over both time and space and can involve interactions and interrelations among multiple people, places, and things. Despite their complexity, they can be named by simple terms, a war or an election or a concert and described in a few words, folding the clothes, rinsing the dishes, or tuning the violin. People have an advantage over their non-verbal relatives in that language can facilitate learning categories and serve as a surrogate for them in reasoning. What are the effects of naming or describing over and above identifying categories? And what do the descriptions reveal about the categories? Here, we examine some of the consequences and characteristics of language for familiar categories, events, and the bodies that perform them.