Open research questions in Categorization, perception, and language
46 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 1,604 Categorization, perception, and language papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the semantic class of emission situation vocabulary from a contrastive-typological perspective. It has been established that sound and smell emission vocabulary forms a distinct semantic class unified by a common conceptual foundation – namely, the modeling of a perceptual interaction situation between its key participants. The emission situation is structured according to a multidimensional concept comprising internal and external scopes. The internal scope reflects invariant 108 Studia Philologica. 2026. Issue 26 DOI: https://doi.org/10.28925/2412-2491.2026.26 ISSN 2412-2491 (Online) semantic components associated with the perceptual properties of the object (sound and olfactory), whereas the external scope encompasses variable parameters of the situation, including situational, deictic, evaluative, gradational, locative, and other components that are actualized at the level of the utterance. Each subclass of emission vocabulary (sound and smell emission) has its own set of constituents within the internal and external scopes of the concept, reflecting the specificity of the corresponding perceptual channel while preserving a shared conceptual model of the situation. Emission verbs are characterized by a high derivational potential and a capacity for regular polysemy, realizing typical patterns of semantic shifts into the domains of state, behavior, mental activity, evaluation, and semiotic interpretation. The expansion of the emission situation concept occurs both within internal (perceptual) and external (value-interpretive) systems. The contrastive analysis of emission predicates in English, German, French, Polish, and Ukrainian has revealed common universal principles governing the organization of emission situation vocabulary, particularly with respect to actant structure, semantic roles, and derivational patterns, while also identifying a number of language-specific features in the realization of certain semantic components and syntactic models. Emission vocabulary functions as a complex multidimensional system reflecting the interaction between human perceptual experience and worldview, and it demonstrates significant potential for further typological and cognitive-semantic research.
(2017) only offered the “really” option in a scenario with positive evidential and negative epistemic bias (correlating with positive really questions), not in the opposite pattern, so it remains unclear how really would be used in negative questions. Having seen that bias plays a pivotal role in the processing of polar questions, it remains to be determined why the dominant bias is positive, and arguably epistemic; negative epistemic bias was only reliably elicited in Russian positive questions with razve.
Processing of Russian and Czech polar questions: Evidence for the effect of question bias · 2026 · DOIHere we take a relatively underresearched type of bilingual processing, simultaneous interpreting, as a case of extreme bilingualism and investigate the effect of emotional language rendering in the L1 on subjective affect and prosodic markers of L2 output.
Emotional Language Processing in Bilingualism: Subjective Affect and Prosodic Markers in Simultaneous Interpreting · 2023 · DOIWhether CIT is a blessing or a curse remains to be seen. Yet, I believe that this incongruity needs to be investigated further to take the form of concrete parameters.
Is blending a godsend or a curse? An attempt at the theory’s assessment from the cognitive linguistic perspective · 2019 · DOIResults showed that 11 Serbian most salient colour terms correspond to the eleven BCTs found by Berlin and Kay (1969), namely, plavo ?blue?, crveno ?red?, zuto ?yellow?, zeleno ?green?, crno ?black?, belo ?white?, ljubicasto ?purple?, narandzasto ?orange?, sivo ?grey?, roze ?pink?, and braon ?brown?, but that basic status of braon needs to be further examined.
The colour lexicon of the Serbian language - a study of dark blue and dark red colour categories Part 1: Colour-term elicitation task · 2018 · DOIIs motion cognition influenced by the large-scale typological patterns proposed in Talmy’s (2000) two-way distinction between verb-framed (V) and satellite-framed (S) languages? Previous studies investigating this question have been limited to comparing two or three languages at a time and have come to conflicting results.
Satellite- vs. Verb-Framing Underpredicts Nonverbal Motion Categorization: Insights from a Large Language Sample and Simulations · 2017 · DOII will argue that from this ethnographic analysis, we can not only derive a better (both wider and more precise) idea of some, rarely studied, cultural translation processes, but also draw from it a new way to define the concept of “cultural ontology,” both for Amazonian cultures and in more general terms.
It is argued that inventory diversities among languages,such as what kinds of means a language possesses,which semantic and pragmatic categories are prominent and powerful so that their formal means can expand to the denotation of other categories,and which categories are lacking special means and have to appeal to means for other categories to express,make the cross-linguistic form-meaning correspondence more complicated than it appears.
Linguistic inventory typology:A proposal for a new approach of linguistic typology · 2011These findings suggest that people's choice of a sense of just is largely determined by the statistical co-occurrence of just with particular classes of words in one's life experience with language: in the case that co-occurrence information is insufficient to narrow one's decision, the larger context provides what is necessary to choose a sense of just.
ABSTRACT: While it has been shown that bilingual code‐mixing (CM) is not random and that there exist rules that determine what code‐mixes are or are not allowed in bilingual speech, it has not been established yet whether the rules in question ‘come’ predominantly from one language, the matrix language, or whether they are evenly contributed by each of the languages participating in CM.
To investigate this primary level of direct language experience, abstraction— separating oneself from what is immediately given—must be avoided. The phenomenologists consider the most "concrete" in consciousness to be not empirical data transcendent to the perceiver, but flowing Gestalt experience. Inquiry must be founded on this spontaneous level of experience. The derivative views of linguistic traditionalism tend toward abstractionism. Words are treated as if they are arbitrary and experienced as separate from what they represent. This separation in traditional investigations of language is an abstraction from the primary experiential operation of language. An inno- Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 03:15 11 December 2015 42 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH cent use of reflective abstraction, asking what a word means, denies access to the primary given realm of our language experience. To use J, L. Austin's celebrated example to an end slightly different from his own: the question, "What is a rat?" is a considerably different question from "What is the meaning of the word 'rat'?" The former question would pose no particular problem for the man on the street, while the latter could only be answered as a particular mental concept —nothing resembling the experiential reality of ongoing discourse.5 While the former question reveals the primary extransparent, language as perience of spontaneous, and exhausting itself in making apparent what is being said, the latter shows language as representational, a derivative mode of experience calling attention to itself. Looking closely at the two questions, the first is sufficient and in itself reveals the nature of language as experienced, i.e., language as a non-object. The second expression is reflexive and abstracted from primary experiences, i.e., language becomes an object. Nearly all semantic studies of language, wittingly or unwittingly, end up considering the second type of question and assume that this research reveals something about primary language experience. While words once reflected upon—collected as a residue of speaking— may seem to refer to tangible entities or mental concepts, the abstraction which this reflection covers or results from hides languages' primary nature. Primary language experience shows itself only in operation. Thus language experience can be explained only by exemplification and not by systematic delineation. Clearly, to understand the primary nature of language in a statement such as "What is a rat?" abstraction and ob- 5 John L. Austin, "The Meaning of a Word," Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and C. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). jectification must be avoided. An adequate description must be pre-predicative; more suggestive than definitive. Phenomenology was designed to produce rigorous investigations of pre-objective, pre-predicative experience. It may be helpful now to couch the development of a constitutive view of language in terms of the basic principles of phenomenology,6 since speech-communication researchers may not be familiar with them. (1) Phenomenology has demonstrated that knowledge is by necessity conscious knowledge: all that is known is held in or available to consciousness. The empirical environment is not, nor can it be, presuppositionlessly grasped or experienced as simple sense impression. What is known is the direct, conscious experience of a thing, i.e., things with a possible use in one's ongoing action in a situation. Consciousness, to the phenomenologist, is not a mental psychological construct but rather the very direction, intention, or mode of doing in a world. In a like manner conscious experience, conscious knowledge, is not 6 Phenomenology is a unique method in that it does not fall to subjective or inferential introspection yet is designed to investigate prepredicative experience rather than objectifications of experience like most scientific methods. The following articles have introduced a type of psychological phenomenology to speech-communication literature. James L. Bemis and Gerald M. Phillips, "A Phenomenological Approach to Communication Theory," Speech Teacher, 13 (Nov. 1964), 262-269; Remo P. Fausti and Arno H. Luker, "A Phenomenological Approach to Discussion," Speech Teacher, 14 (Jan. 1965), 19- 23; Richard B.
Our study asked a different Both image when the verbal code is insufficient this and the verbal basis of recognition question-were which colors come to have to each other verbal code? Only to this question, codes were dicted relations influenced by the the nature of memory errors provide data relevant that is, only cases in which verbal and/or visual memory identification.
265) has observed t h a t in a competitive society such as ours the increment in P I M S (in our terms) of differential re- wards and competitive success will more than offset the negative con- tribution resulting from the interpersonal loss, particularly when the reward is scarce and valuable.
The generality and significance of semantic differential scales as measures of “morale” · 1970 · DOISince these patterns vary widely, the modes of thinking and perceiving in groups utilizing different linguistic systems will result in basically different world views” (Fearing, 1954).
Much more remains to be discovered. Since we are limited by the fact that the German word-list extends to only 2,400 words we are unable to take the combined product as far as we would wish.
Consequently, sampling methods likely affected the generalizability of the behavioural norms to the spectrum of educational attainment levels and SESs and the experiences afforded by these contexts and are a limitation of the present study.
Frequency alone does not account for the semantic profile of the nouns: the less frequent disgust has a sharply defined collocational environment, while the highly frequent surprise includes both an emotional reaction proper and linguistic evaluation of event predictability.
COCA as a Representative Corpus for the Study of Basic Emotions in Contemporary English · 2026 · DOICurrent research on fictional worlds is dominated by the analysis of micro-level phenomena, while the holistic spatial-hierarchical organization of media franchises remains underexplored.
Cultural astronomy has long documented how human societies interpret celestial phenomena, yet the linguistic dimension—how languages grammatically and lexically encode astronomical knowledge—remains systematically underexplored.
Celestial categories: How languages encode, structure, and transmit astronomical knowledge across cultures · 2026 · DOIIt also explores the possible contextual categorization of two understudied types of non-root categoryless expressions: categoryless coordination and categoryless modification complexes.
Finally, we have laid out some of the ways in which this linguistic and conceptual phenomenon could be further studied to get more reliable results to account for the observed effects.
We focus on an underexplored question: Why does systematic polysemy cluster in the ways it does? That is, why do we see certain regular patterns of sense multiplicity, but not others? Drawing on an independently motivated view of kind cognition – i.
Discussion The present work covers an existent gap in Basque and Spanish in terms of the lack of datasets that include both word similarity and detailed lexical properties, which provides a more useful resource for psycholinguistics research in those languages.
Bridging Natural Language Processing and psycholinguistics: computationally grounded semantic similarity datasets for Basque and Spanish · 2024 · DOIHowever, there is as yet insufficient information regarding whether the theoretical and empirical arguments for distinguishing happiness from joy also apply to folk representations of these concepts.
This article claims that to amplify the significance of emotion-language intersection in the brain entirely, emotions should be studied in mono- and bilingual contexts.
Most-cited papers in Categorization, perception, and language
- The Whorfian hypothesis: A cognitive psychology perspective. · Psychological Review · 1991 · 218 citations
- From Text to Thought: How Analyzing Language Can Advance Psychological Science · Perspectives on Psychological Science · 2021 · 113 citations
- Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment · Nature Human Behaviour · 2020 · 91 citations
- An Essay on the Relativity of Categories · Philosophy of Science · 1955 · 84 citations
- Iconicity in Word Learning and Beyond: A Critical Review · Language and Speech · 2020 · 79 citations
- Large language models predict human sensory judgments across six modalities · Scientific Reports · 2024 · 54 citations
- The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today · Theory and Practice in Language Studies · 2012 · 53 citations
- The Discursive Perspective of Market Categorization: Interaction, Power, and Context · Research in the sociology of organizations · 2017 · 40 citations
- Transmutating beings · Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2014 · 38 citations
- What is a register? · Register Studies · 2023 · 38 citations
Most recent work
- Retraction Note: Linguacultural and Cognitive Peculiarities of Linguistic Universals · Journal of Psycholinguistic Research · 2026
- Topicality, word order and voice in Otomi · Typological studies in language · 2026
- LACUNAE IN LINGUISTICS: THEORY, TYPOLOGY, AND CROSS-LINGUISTIC SIGNIFICANCE · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Meaning as Distribution: A U–M–C Model of Contextual Interpretation in Bangla · International Journal Of Recent Trends In Multidisciplinary Research · 2026
- Regional Pragmatic Variation in Tag Questions: A Corpus-Based Comparison of Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese · Corpus Pragmatics · 2026
- What underlies differences in emotional expression in L1 and L2? Examining the lexical properties of narratives · JoCN Forum · 2026
- Contextually categorizing eventive polar questions · Journal of East Asian Linguistics · 2026
- Making do without prepositions: Exploring serial verb and applicative shared functions in Central Salish · Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2026
- The Effects of Animacy and Complexity on the Morphosyntactic Acquisition of English Genitives by Jordanian Arabic Speakers · International Journal of Arabic-English Studies · 2026
- Celestial categories: How languages encode, structure, and transmit astronomical knowledge across cultures · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
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