Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people understand linguistic descriptions of inherently and potentially social events, such as to meet and to dance, and how do these interpretations align or differ across languages? To explore these questions, we developed an empirical database (LISADA), containing ratings for 240 verbs in English and German along two social dimensions: mutuality and jointness. While both languages show an overall positive correlation between these dimensions, hierarchical cluster analyses reveal meaningful within- and cross-linguistic differences. Through an exemplary test case, we demonstrate how these differences can provide insights into the linguistic and conceptual representations of social events, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic marking in event construal.