Speaking of death

Journal article

As a human-specific trait, language offers a unique window on human cognition. Grammatical constraints on thewayswe speak about events, for instance, have long been thought to reveal the representational formats that our minds impose on the ways that we think about events. In recent research, verbs that name events of death have stood out as key counterexamples to standard theories of the grammatical constraints on possible verbs. The special status of these thanatological verbs raises two important questions: why, given the vast number of verbs in any language, is it that verbs of death hold this special status, and what do they tell us about the restrictions on the representational format for possible verbs? This paper reexamines the evidence coming from verbs of death, confirming that they are counterexamples to standard theories, but that their behaviour suggests a more revealing constraint on our mental representations—that our minds impose strict restrictions on the format of asserted meaning. Thus, the constraints on linguistic representation and the human mind offer a unique perspective on the mental representations of thanatological phenomena.

Authors: Husband, E

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Royal Society
• Journal: Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences
• Volume: 373
• Issue: 1754
• Pages: 20180172
• Publication date: 2018-07-16
• Acceptance date: 2018-05-31
• DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2018.0172
• EISSN: 1471-2970
• ISSN: 0962-8436
• Keywords: manner/result complementarity; lexical semantics; assertion; possible words; verb representation; presupposition