DO/MAKE across languages and minds

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL] Viberg, Åke [Uppsala universitet]

'Do' and 'make', as high-frequency verbs, have equivalents in most languages. Some languages, however, have only one verb corresponding to both 'do' and 'make' (cf. French 'faire' and Italian 'fare'), which suggests a different organisation of the semantic space. Interestingly, even Germanic languages such as Dutch or German, which have verbs related to 'do' and 'make' (Dutch 'doen'/'maken', German 'tun'/'machen'), appear to divide up the semantic space differently (see e.g. Nehls 1991). In this presentation, we will compare English 'do' and 'make' with their equivalents in a number of languages including Swedish, French and Dutch. Our comparison will involve both language and cognition. The former will be studied through parallel corpora, which will show how the verbs are most frequently translated into the other languages. The corpus data will also allow us to draw a map of the semantic spaces of DO/MAKE as they exist in the different languages. The more cognitive approach, on the other hand, will rely on experimental data aiming to identify the most salient senses of 'do' and 'make' and of their equivalents in the other languages. The combination of the two approaches, linguistic and cognitive, will provide new insights into the “typological profiles” (Viberg 2004/2005) of the DO/MAKE verbs. Thus, it will be possible to answer questions such as the following: does the most frequent sense of a verb correspond to the sense that comes first to mind? is the most salient, prototypical sense more likely to have a congruent translation, as suggested by Viberg’s (2006) results? are prototypes universal or are they determined by language? More generally, this study will contribute towards our further understanding of the relationship between language and cognition.