Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German

Abstract At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie ) and Patient (i.e., the bagel ). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as the knife are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled “Instrument”) and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto‐instrument is a tool : a physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individu... Mehr ...