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The Representation of Giving Actions : Event Construction in the Service of Monitoring Social Relationships
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Authors
Editors
Keywords
action schema
event construction
giving
naïve sociology
taking
General Psychology
event construction
giving
naïve sociology
taking
General Psychology
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/26969
Abstract
Giving is a unique attribute of human sharing. In this review, we discuss evidence attesting to our species’ preparedness to recognize interactions based on this behavior. We show that infants and adults require minimal cues of resource transfer to relate the participants of a giving event in an interactive unit (A gives X to B) and that such an interpretation does not systematically generalize to superficially similar taking events, which may be interpreted in nonsocial terms (A takes X). We argue that this asymmetry, echoed in language, reveals the operations of a mechanism of event construction where participant roles are encoded only when they are crucial to rendering an action teleologically well-formed. We show that such a representation of giving allows people to monitor the direction (who gave to whom) and kind (what was given) of resource transfer within a dyad, suggesting that giving may be interpreted as indicative of a relationship based on long-term balance. As this research suggests, advancing the study of the prelinguistic representation of giving has implications for cognitive linguistics, by clarifying the relation between event participants and syntactic arguments, as well as social cognition, by identifying which kinds of relational inferences people draw from attending to acts of sharing.
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Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2024-04-24
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1177/09637214241242460