Research seminar: Anna Sjöberg, Stockholm University/Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena

Title: Knowing, thinking, seeing – cross-linguistic semantics through Behavioral Profiles.

Seminar

Date:

Thursday 20 November 2025

Time:

15.00 – 17.00

Location:

C307, Södra huset

 

Abstract:

All languages appear to have vocabulary dedicated to expressing how people perceive and conceptualize their surroundings — for example, what they see, what they think or what they know.

While there is of course considerable inter-language variation in these vocabularies, there are also striking cross-linguistic commonalities — for instance, most languages appear to have (at least) a predicate roughly equivalent to know, distinct both from perception and more general cognition (‘think’).

In this talk, I explore both cross-linguistic and language-specific characteristics of cognition-perception vocabularies in a small variety sample of spoken corpus data.

I take a usage-based approach and model predicates using combinations of cross-linguistic and language-specific features, whose specific configuration form a predicate’s Behavioral Profile.

In particular, I focus on the typically most frequent predicates, namely those meaning ‘know’ and ‘see’, and I show that there are consistent differences in their Behavioral Profiles cross-linguistically, which I discuss in terms of their communicative functions.

On Anna Sjöberg