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What Are Events?
Abstract This study reviews research on the conceptual structures and cognitive mechanisms that underlie the human ability to cope with the dynamicity of the world, a phenomenon often subsumed under the term event cognition. It identifies four distinct theoretical perspectives in the literature: the participant-based view, the boundary-based view, the object-states view, and the event-layer view. The basic ideas that constitute each perspective are outlined, and the methods and empirical data that are typically presented in support of each perspective are discussed. After an evaluation summarizing differences and similarities, the conclusion is that likely only a unification of the four approaches makes it possible to capture all aspects of the phenomenon, including those related to perception, conceptual representation and linguistic encoding, and thus be of value to researchers across different disciplines. The final section offers some ideas on what such a unified approach might look like.
Keywords Event cognition; thematic roles; event boundaries; object states; event layers; cross-linguistic differences
