Basic levels of categorization: A comparison of selected English and Polish verbs

Abstract

The phenomenon of basic level concepts in cognition and categorization, so crucial in the cognitive account of natural language is typically accessed via what is perceptually the most outstanding phenomena represented in many languages, at least those rooted in Proto-IndoEuropean (specifically English and Polish) by nouns fulfilling the criteria of basic terms, originally established for classifying color vocabulary. These are prototypical examples in the category of nouns – relating to countable, material objects. Nominal representation, according to Langacker (1987) is indicative of a given stimulus being perceived and conceptualized as a thing, i.e., a region in one or more cognitive domains (conceptions) established in the speakers’ minds. This is a rather self-imposing construal of physical, countable stimuli, which meet the good gestalt criteria, such as animals, plants, and man-made objects of everyday use. The semantic scopes of nouns representing such phenomena seem to overlap to a relatively high degree across languages, especially related ones, such as English and Polish, and finding the precise equivalents within them does not pose particular problems. This is hardly the case when it comes to phenomena represented by verbs and classifiable as processes in Langacker’s cognitive, semantic account of the division of words into parts of speech. A comparison of the meaning of selected basic English verbs and their closest Polish counterparts reveals serious discrepancies in a number of cases. Thus, certain basic English verbs representing common, everyday physical activities prove to differ considerably from their Polish counterparts with regard to their respective levels of schematicity/ specificity of meaning, and, in consequence, the range of cognitive domains involved in their semantic scopes. This is the case of such equivalent lexemes as płynąć/pływać – swim; sail; flow; float or break – łamać; tłuc; rwać; drzeć. In both cases, one language is quite specific while the other is much more schematic as regards the actual cognitive domains activated by corresponding words and the degree to which that activation in the stimulated conceptual blends depends on the lexical context in which the respective words are used. This indicates that even related languages spoken by communities from similar cultural circles may codify considerably different construals of the same nonmaterial phenomena, specifically processes.